


(Of a) Dying Breed

by LikelyRowdy



Category: DmC: Devil May Cry
Genre: Action & Romance, Eventual Smut, F/M, I have no idea what I'm doing, Reboot, Slow-ish burn, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-10-28
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:54:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 46,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25411213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LikelyRowdy/pseuds/LikelyRowdy
Summary: Kat and Vergil save a college student from Limbo and recruit her into The Order. Her life is thrown for a loop when she comes face-to-face with her boss’s twin brother, Dante.
Relationships: Dante (DmC)/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 16





	1. Welcome to The Order, Alexis

**Author's Note:**

> And here it is, my first attempt at writing fanfiction. Fingers crossed!  
> · · ·  
> Alexis is dragged into Limbo. She is saved by Vergil and Kat.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alexis is dragged into Limbo when she hands in her final exam. She is saved by Kat and Vergil.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I'm going through the first couple chapters and making edits as they pop up. Hopefully it all reads a little better now.

Alexis sat outside of her assigned testing room, hastily reading through her notes one last time. At least she wasn’t alone. Waiting with her was an entire group of grim-faced juniors and seniors, counting down the seconds until the exam proctor let them into the room so that they could take their final exam – waiting for the exam, the anticipate, was always the worst part. It sounded, from the murmurings of her classmates, that none of them felt truly prepared to meet their fate, but as the proctor arrived and let them filter into the room, Alexis hoped that she was more prepared than most; otherwise, the countless hours spent both in study groups and at home had been for nothing.

Faced with the exam itself, she began to feel jittery, her head pounding in time with the ever-present _tick_ of the clock at the back of the classroom. Maybe she’d had too much coffee that morning? Maybe she hadn’t had enough? She tried to ignore the frantic beating of her heart as a voice in the back of her head reminded her that a handful of wrong answers could mean the difference between four more years at Limbo University or a top-tier medical program.

She breezed through the multiple-choice questions – turns out that the study groups had been worth it – and was half way through the written portion of the exam when the headache that had been brewing since she work up became unbearable. She placed her pencil down and drew a shaky breath; in her nose, out her mouth. Running her hands over her face, she brought her fingers up to massage her temples and zoned out, concentrating on each swell of pain as it gradually melted away to a dull, non-distracting ache.

That was when she noticed the proctor’s eyes on her. Self-conscious, Alexis grabbed her pencil and continued her written answers, successfully losing herself in the test and ignoring the proctor’s attention. The sooner she could wrap up the exam, the sooner summer could start.

Only a smattering of test-takers remained when Alexis convinced herself that staring at her own finished exam wasn’t going to miraculously improve her grade. She silently gathered her materials so as not to disturb anyone and made her way to the front of the class. The unwavering gaze of the proctor was on her again. She offered the woman a small, kind smile before averting her gaze and handing over her exam.

The sudden steel grip on her wrist almost made Alexis jump out of her skin, a startled sound escaping past her lips as her head shot up.

Black. The proctor’s eyes were black, droplets of dark blood spilling past lashes to drip down her ashen cheeks. Around them, tables and chairs launched into the air as the linoleum floor roiled and cracked into odd angles. The hair on the back of Alexis’ neck stood on end as a disembodied voice growled and the visage of the proctor faded away to reveal the smooth, grey face of a monster.

**_FOUND YOU!_ **

Alexis screamed, wrenching her arm as she fell backwards over the uneven floor. The creature jumped on top of the desk as Alexis scrambled to her feet and ran out the door, yelling for help in the uncannily deserted hallways of the university. She could feel the monster hot on her trail as she raced through the once-familiar halls, their appearance mutilated and ever-shifting as she searched for the nearest exit, finally hurtling through a door and making it outside. Alexis sputtered and let loose an ear-splitting scream as more monsters clawed their way up from the concrete of the courtyard.

_What the fuck was going on?_

* * *

Kat yelped, grabbing her head in both hands.

“What is it?”

She looked up at her boss, wincing. “I don’t know. A cry for help? I’ve never felt anything like it before.”

“From Limbo?” Vergil pressed; his interest piqued. He hadn’t heard anything.

The medium nodded as the pressure in her head increased. Whatever it was, it was clearly in distress.

“Is it a demon?”

“No,” Kat was certain it wasn’t, though she couldn’t be sure how. “There’s nothing demonic about it. I’m not sure what it is, I’ve never-,” another cry rattled her. “We have to go.”

Vergil grabbed his keys and followed Kat to the car, starting it up as she gave him directions through the city streets. They didn’t drive far, Kat zeroing in on a spot close to the university when she suddenly yelled at Vergil to pull over and threw herself out of the car, dashing across traffic and down a side street. Vergil followed, beginning to pick up the sounds of an otherworldly scuffle and the wails that Kat must have picked up on.

“She’s trapped,” Kat dropped to her knees with a spray can, “I’m sending you in.”

* * *

Nothing but smooth concrete was behind her now. Alexis was well and truly backed into a corner. This was how she was going to die, and she didn’t even understand what was happening or how she ended up there. A monster raised its blade and she turned to over her face, yowling as metal ripped through her clothes and sank into her flesh. She let loose another cry for help, hoping that someone, _anyone_ , would hear her.

Her prayers, it seemed, had been answered. Before her stood, well, the monsters, but behind them there now stood a man. He moved effortlessly as he cut down each of the monsters before he turned his blue eyes on to her.

“This way.”

Around her, the world faded from technicolor back to normal as Alexis swayed, lightheaded as she tried to follow the strange man with the katana. A gloved hand gripped her shoulder, holding her upright, “Are you alright?”

“I…”

A gasp sounded from over her shoulder, the man wasn’t alone, “Vergil!”

Alexis let the man – _Vergil_ – turn her around to inspect her back and she became keenly aware of the wound there, as well as the blood caking her clothes and sticking to her skin. Pain assaulted her all at once as the adrenaline began to wear out of her system.

“We’re going to patch you up, okay?” Vergil said as he steered her out of the alley. She was silent as they sat her down in a car, her back staining the leather interior red. As the car began to move, she was hit by a wave of nausea.

“I need to go to the hospital,” Alexis murmured, blinking heavily as she brought her fingers to her temples and wishing away the nausea.

The unnamed woman shared a look with Vergil before he addressed Alexis calmly, “We can’t take you to the hospital.”

“What? Why?”

“It’s not safe. We’ll patch you up once we get to-.”

“Not safe?” Alexis balked, body singing with worry as her nausea was forgotten. Why wouldn’t the hospital be safe? “I can’t go with you. I don’t even _know you_.”

Before Vergil could say anything else, the woman interjected, “My name is Kat. This is my boss, Vergil. We just want to help,” she soothed. They seemed to be communicating without saying a word, and at Vergil’s nod Kat continued, “Those things that attacked you, they’re not from this world. They know that you’re hurt. If we take you to the hospital, they’ll find you.”

 _…and finish what they started._ She hadn’t considered that, hadn’t considered much of anything since the pain had set in and her world began to spin from blood loss.

“Let us help you.”

Words escaped her, so Alexis closed her eyes and nodded, taking a deep breath – it wasn’t like she had been left with much of a choice once the car slowed to a stop outside of a dingy garage.

Alexis was led into a building, Kat immediately taking her to a bathroom and shutting the door. Grabbing a first aid kit from the medicine cabinet, she scrubbed her hands clean before turning around, sheepish as she motioned toward Alexis’ ruined clothes, “I’m going to need you to take those off for me. Do you think you can get it?”

The jacket came off easily enough once it was fully unzipped, but the shirt had been another story. Alexis hissed through clenched teeth as she tugged the fabric free of her tender skin and slid the in-tact strap of her bra off of her shoulder. She lowered the toilet lid and sat facing the tank so that her back was exposed.

“We didn’t get your name back there,” Kat spoke as she rummaged through the first aid kit.

 _This will need stitches._ “Alexis.”

Kat gave her a half smile to try and comfort her as she disappeared behind her back. Alexis watched what she could of the woman in the mirror, thankful for the help, but uneasy around the strangers after such a freak encounter, “What were you doing in Limbo, Alexis?”

“Limbo?”

She hissed when Kat pressed a disinfectant wipe to her skin.

“Sorry, I know this part hurts,” Kat apologized as she continued to wipe away at the blood before another packet was ripped open. “Where you were. We call it Limbo. It’s a parallel dimension to the human world,” Finished wiping at Alexis’s back, Kat moved to throw away the blood-stained wipes. A feather-soft touch brushed tender skin; the bathroom silent for a beat too long.

“What?” Was something wrong? Had those freaks done something to her?

Kat hesitated. “I need Vergil to see this. Stay here.”

Alexis shifted uncomfortably in her spot, suddenly aware of the chill that pricked her revealed skin. She didn’t have much time to think about it. Kat was back in a couple of seconds with Vergil in tow, the three of them now crammed into the small bathroom.

Vergil took Kat’s previous position at Alexis’s back, his gloved hand light like Kat’s had been at first, but then prodding at the sensitive flesh. Lexi hissed, but the sharp pain she had been expecting had been replaced by a dull throb.

“Fascinating.”

Alexis stood, forcing Vergil backwards into Kat as she turned so she could look at her back in the mirror. Where the gash should have been there was now only a red line, but even that was fading before her eyes. Her jaw dropped; her mind unable to wrap itself around the smooth skin where there had been a gaping wound not even thirty minutes ago. If it weren’t for the bloody clothes on the bathroom floor, Alexis might not have believed that she had ever been injured in the first place.

“It’s healed itself,” Vergil supplied as he turned her back towards him once again, holding her shoulders to keep her still as his eyes studied the expanse of smooth skin carefully.

“Do you even hear yourself right now?”

“Has this ever happened to you before?” Vergil questioned as one of his hands ran between her shoulder blades, his brow furrowing as he ran his gloved hand over two identical scars – they were easy to miss, smoothed and faded by time, hardly noticeable except for how they caught the light above the bathroom mirror. “How did you get these scars?”

“What do they have to do with anything? Why is my back in one piece?”

“Where did you get the scars? Please, it’s important.”

Alexis shrugged stiffly as her mind raced, “I don’t know. I’ve had them for as long as I can remember.”

“And how log is that?”

“What?”

“Did anything ever happen to you that made you forget something? Car crash? Sickness?”

“No! Why would-?”

“And this has never happened to you before?”

“I’ve never had my back sliced open before, so…”

“It could have been anything. Sprained ankles, paper cuts, headaches?”

Alexis paused. Her friends had always joked that she had magic fingers, some sort of healing touch, but she had never thought too much into it. It was a placebo effect. But there had been that god-awful headache that morning during her final, and the nausea in the car…

Vergil found an answer in her silence. “I think it’s best if you stay here.”

“Thank you for your help and all, really, but I need to _go_ ,” she responded, awkward and rushed as she ducked down to grab her ruined shirt and pulled the sticky fabric over her head.

“Please,” Kat piped up from the doorway, “It’s not safe for you out there.”

“And why the fuck not?”

“The demons have your scent now,” Vergil explained, “They’ll be after you.”

Alexis chuckled humorlessly, “Demons? If demons were real – _which they’re not_ – why would they be after _me?_ ”

“You don’t know?” it was more a statement than a question as it left Vergil’s lips.

She rolled her eyes, “But you _clearly_ do, so please, Vergil, enlighten me.”

“You’re not human, Alexis. You’re an angel.”

Stunned silence took the small room.

“Now I _know_ you’re crazy,” she mumbled, but the looks on Vergil and Kat’s faces told her that they were not joking. “…You’re serious.”

“Like I said. It’s safest if you stay here.”

“We just want to help,” assured Kat.

Alexis looked between the two before she nodded, trying to wrap her mind around it. Demons were real. Angels were…

“Kat will bring you home so you can grab your things,” Vergil started, meeting Alexis’s sea green eyes, “And maybe once you’re settled, I can teach you to defend yourself.”

Still in shock, Alexis found it best to agree for now, “I think I’d like that. Thank you, Vergil.”

On the ride to her small apartment, Kat had filled her in on some of the basics. They worked for an organization called The Order, which Vergil had founded to combat the demons’ tyrannical rule over mankind. There was more to it, but when pressed, Kat had said that it wasn’t her place to say. When they had returned to what Alexis now understood to be The Order’s headquarters, Vergil greeted them and offered to carry Alexis’s bag as he walked her to her new room.

“Welcome to The Order, Alexis.”

Exhausted, she mustered up the best smile she could, “Vergil, if we’re going to be roommates, you’re going to have to stop calling me Alexis.”


	2. Finding Dante

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lexi and Kat go over their plan to bring Dante to The Order when the appearance of the Hunter changes things.

It had been a month give or take since Lexi had formally joined The Order and moved permanently into the compound. At first, she hadn’t been sure she would want to stay, but as her eyes were opened to the truth – about the demons and herself – she found that she didn’t want to leave. Originally her plan had been to spend the summer preparing for medical school, but those plans had well and thoroughly been blown to shit. Instead, she found herself helping her new friends track down Vergil’s long-lost brother, Dante, who Vergil insisted was the key to defeating Mundus.

Some nights, as she stared up at the dappled ceiling of her room, Lexi found that she was still coming to terms with it – not being human. Her entire life up to that point, everything she had ever known, had been flipped on its head with the spotter’s attack, but who knew how long she would have made it before a spotter finally found her. In truth, she had been incredibly lucky that Kat had heard her call for help.

Running was something that she picked up both as a part of Vergil’s training and as a way to clear her head. They ran together every morning, Vergil using the time to survey, strategize, and pick up intel. The man was a machine, and he continually pushed Lexi’s endurance past anything she had ever thought she would be capable of.

That particular morning, they ran in a comfortable silence. Vergil was stuck in his head as he had been for the last couple of days. It was understandable, they were collecting his brother the next day. He was so close to reuniting with his brother he could taste it. They all could. The last piece of their fucked-up puzzle almost within their grasp.

At first, Dante had been a hard man to find, but after receiving a tip that he enjoyed the company of the ladies down at Devil’s Dalliance regardless of how his name never made the list, Kat had been able to track him to a trailer on the outskirts of the Bellview Pier. It wasn’t long after that, however, that Dante became careless, too comfortable in his tin can of a trailer to bother covering his tracks and leaving a trail that anyone or anything could pick up on if they knew what they were looking for. Thankfully, they had found it first.

Vergil scanned them back in to the compound through the clever façade that hid the front entrance. They made their way past the employees who had begun to trickle in at the early hour and to a small but functional kitchen.

Lexi grabbed two bottles from the fridge and tossed one to Vergil, releasing a sigh once her bottle was empty. “Tomorrow’s the day,” caught in his own thoughts, Vergil hadn’t registered the statement, looking at her quizzically while taking his own sip of water, “It’s been a long time since you’ve seen each other.”

“Since we were 7,” Vergil confirmed with a small smile.

“Do you think he’ll remember you?”

“No. Our father saw to that. But it will be good to have him back.”

Lexi nodded. She was glad that she wasn’t the one dealing with a long-lost sibling. Learning that she wasn’t human had been enough.

Returning to the kitchen after a shower, Lexi found that Kat had placed a mug of coffee in front of her usual spot. Wrapping her hands around the mug, Lexi inhaled deeply – _god_ she loved the smell of coffee in the morning. She took a sip of the scalding liquid, “Morning, Kat.”

“Morning,” Kat greeted, offering a smile.

“What’re you working on?” Lexi nodded toward the thin plastic sheet spread across the table.

Held up to the light, it became instantly more recognizable, “My old gateway template was falling apart, so I’m making a new one. This plastic should last longer than the cardboard.”

“Easier to clean too,” god only knew what Kat bottled in those aerosols, but it smelled vile.

The two chatted about this and that as Lexi drank her coffee and Kat finished up work on her template until the conversation inevitably shifted to Dante. Unable to collect his brother himself, Vergil was sending Kat to collect Dante the next morning, but no one was sure of the best way to approach him. How was anyone supposed to convince Dante, who has been on the run from demons his whole life, that they were there to help? They didn’t have long to think on it before Vergil hurried into the room.

“Change of plans,” he clipped, tossing his car keys at Kat, “You need to get Dante now. Lexi, go with her.”

Kat was already off to her room to grab her spray can holster as Lexi tilted her head toward Vergil, “Slow down Vergil, what happened?”

“They found him.”

* * *

Kat raced to the pier, apparently having taken Vergil’s ‘drive it like you stole it’ to heart and doing her damnedest to get them both killed. Lexi clutched the _oh shit_ bar until her knuckles turned white, her life flashing before her eyes as Kat ran another red light, but they made it both in time and in one piece. Kat ran up to the pier’s lone trailer and rapped at the door, “Dante! Get out of there, you’re in danger!”

When the door remained shut tight, Lexi stepped forward to help Kat with her assault, but before she could the trailer door was thrown open. Dante’s black hair was a stark contrast to his brother’s silver – not what Lexi had expected at all – but their faces were unmistakably similar and a familiar necklace hung around his neck between his pecs. He was all lightly tanned skin, flat plains, defined muscles, and – she gasped and tore her eyes away – he was completely naked. Embarrassed, she turned around to keep an eye out for the Hunter demon as Kat tried to get Dante out of his trailer.

Dread seized her as the Hunter rose from the depths of the sea, invisible to the humans around the pier, save for Kat.

“Kat, he’s here!”

“Who’s here? What’s going on?”

Lexi dove for her friend, knocking them both to the ground as the demon let out a roared and pulled Dante’s trailer into the ocean, destroying it as Dante was dragged into Limbo.

“I’m sending you in after him. Get Dante to the other end of the pier, there should be another rift there,” Kat scrambled to her knees and pulled out her spray can. “Do not engage with the Hunter, it’s too strong.”

Lexi fazed into Limbo and jogged to catch up with Dante as he finished off a group of lesser stygian.

“What are you doing here?” he snarled.

Wary of the longsword – Rebellion, Vergil had called it once –, Lexi stopped opposite him, “I was sent in to help. You shouldn’t-.”

“I don’t need your help.”

Undeterred, Lexi rolled her eyes. _Great, a tough guy._ Walking past Dante, she headed toward the other end of the pier as Kat had instructed, “Well you’ve got it anyway. Come on, this way.”

The two ran down the pier, Lexi following the ashy shadow of Kat as the Hunter ripped up the planks of the pier behind them. As Lexi dove across the final divide, Dante jumped high.

“Ebony. Ivory,” he cooed, “I missed you girls.”

“You named your guns?”

Dante regarded her with a cool smirk, nodding at the gun on her hip, “You didn’t?”

Glimpsing the Hunter, Dante took aim and fired until it slunk away, only to train a gun on Kat when she startled him.

“Don’t shoot! My name is Kat – I’m not a demon. I’m still in the real world. You’re in Limbo.”

Lexi moved to Kat’s defense, holding her short sword to Dante’s throat in the hopes that he would stand down, but Dante didn’t flinch as the cool steel pressed into his skin, instead training his second gun on her and leaning into her blade, calling Lexi’s bluff and forcing her to drop it.

“How come I can see you clearly?”

“I’m a medium – a psychic – I can phase into Limbo and communicate with you.”

“She can see and talk to you, but she isn’t actually in Limbo with us. Now-.”

“And if I pull the trigger?” Dante hadn’t taken his eyes off of Kat for even a second.

“I’ll die.”

Lexi attempted to push the gun trained on her to the side, but Dante was immovable, solid as a rock, “We’re both risking our lives for you. We just want to help.”

Finally holstering his guns, Dante turned from Kat to Lexi, settling on the more tangible of the two and leaning over her to drive his point home, “I don’t need your help.”

“The Hunter dragged you into Limbo,” Kat insisted as Dante pushed past them. “He’s not your regular demon, I can get you out.”

Dante cut himself off as Kat’s promise of getting him out of Limbo began to bring him around. Kat took her chance, “Follow me. Now.”

He followed as they ran further down the pier before purposely jumping into the unhinged Ferris wheel to grab his jacket, leaving Lexi to handle a pair of lesser stygian. A disembodied fist rose from the rubble, making to grab them as Kat directed both his and Lexi’s attention to the funhouse. Lexi tripped, falling as the doorway was blocked behind them.

Dante offered Lexi a hand up, hauling her to her feet and pulling her close, his grip still firm on her wrist. She was cute – big green eyes, pouty lips, long legs. Lexi craned her neck to meet his eyes, suddenly aware of how close they were in the dark hallway. Dammit, she was staring.

He smirked, “I’m Dante, and you’re…?”

“I already know who you are,” then after a beat she supplied, “Lexi.”

Lexi dropped Dante’s hand as she moved past him and up the stairs, Dante’s eyes landing on her firm backside. They were both taken off-guard when the Hunter shattered a mirror, slamming Lexi into a wall in its pursuit of Dante. She picked herself up after Dante parried the demon through a wall and continued to the next room, finally reaching the exit.

The Hunter demon was waiting for them when they reemerged on the pier. Dante drew his guns, but Lexi brought up a hand to stop him, “Those won’t work.”

“Why not?”

Had he failed to notice that none of his shots had landed? “It’s bulletproof.”

The Hunter slipped out of sight once more and Dante dropped his guns.

“Lexi! Dante! There’s a rift up ahead!” Kat called from across the pier.

“A what?”

“Our way out of here. We can come back for the Hunter later.”

**_TRAP HIM._ **

The Hunter reappeared, bringing down the building between its prey and the rift, leaving them only one way out of Limbo. Kat launched a Molotov cocktail at the demon, its face lit ablaze as a spell within took away the demon’s defenses.

Lexi could tell from the way Dante glowered that he was gearing up for the fight. She focused on her breathing. Outside of her trainings with Vergil, she had only ever fought lesser demons. One wrong move would mean the end.

Dante was truly in his element while fighting. He moved to a wild, self-taught beat that was so unlike his brother’s more refined fighting style. Lexi tried to stay out of his way, slicing at the Hunter’s heels in an effort to slow it down before moving to join Dante’s attack on the stunned demon’s face as Kat had recommended.

The Hunter crashed to the pier, struggled briefly, then accepted its fate with a snarl, “Son of Sparda.”

“Son of who?”

“You have been found. You are dead, just like your _whore_ mother.”

“Whore mother? I don’t know my mother, but if you’re calling me a son of a bitch – you wouldn’t be the first.”

Kat and Lexi shared a look. It was just as Vergil had said, Dante didn’t know anything. They were going to have to start at square one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated 8.03.2020


	3. The Sexual Deviant Meets The Masked Freak

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kat and Lexi bring Dante to The Order.

Around them, the world faded from the oversaturated hues of Limbo to the muted tones of the human Bellview Pier as the Hunter demon dissolved into Limbo. In the demon’s pursuit of Dante, the pier had been utterly wrecked, boards falling into the sea as people tried to find ways around small fires and gaping holes to reach the safety of the mainland.

“Where’s Dante?”

Lexi whipped around. Dante had been right behind her but had managed to slip away unseen, used to life on the run. “He was right here…”

Disappointed, Kat reached for her phone to update Vergil, but Lexi stopped her. Vergil didn’t need to know that his brother had slipped through their fingers so long as they got him back.

“It’s okay, we’ll find him. He can’t have gone too far.” There was no need to worry Vergil over this yet.

Kat hesitated before she nodded and walked briskly to the car. “Let’s just find him before someone else does.”

Both women scanned the road as Kat slowly drove out of the parking lot. Fingers crossed, they would find him along the only road that led to and from the pier. Luck was on their side. A lone figure walked away from the pier, head down, hands in his pockets, doing his best to make himself invisible as he trudged away from the destruction. Lexi climbed over the center console and into the backseat as Kat put on her hazard lights and pulled over, relief rolling off of her in waves.

Dante stopped, a mix of bone tired and irritated as he sensed their approach.

“Are you okay, Dante?”

He didn’t acknowledge them with a glance, “How did you know my name?”

Lexi leaned over the center console, “Our boss knows you. He wants to meet.”

He didn’t budge. “Please,” Kat persisted, “we helped you back there.”

Dante finally turned to lean against the car, fixing both women with a glare, “I didn’t ask for your help.”

Just then, a police car flew by, its siren blaring as it made its way to the pier. Conflict was clear in Dante’s eyes; he was weighing his options, trying to choose the lesser of two perceived evils. He made his choice when a second police car passed them, opening the passenger door and sitting stiffly in the passenger seat, his back angled against the door so he could keep an eye on both of them. Lexi was sure that if the backseat had its own doors that he would have preferred to sit there with both of them easily in sight.

Kat pulled a U-turn as Lexi let Vergil know that they had Dante and were on their way home.

“We all know about you, Dante. We’re with an organization called The Order. Heard of it?”

“Something to do with that masked freak on the net?”

Lexi chuckled, “That’s our boss.”

“Wonderful. Can’t wait.” Dante hadn’t shifted his attention from them as Kat drove, but he had relaxed a little more into his seat. He had to be tired, Lexi certainly was. She turned her own attention from Dante to the window, blankly staring at other cars and buildings as they flew by.

When they pulled through the chain-link gate outside of the compound, they sky was dark. Kat ducked under the garage door and scanned herself into the secret entrance.

“The demons are amongst us Dante; they are enslaving mankind. The world is asleep, brainwashed, and helpless.” The brick door gave way and Kat smiled over her shoulder at a surprised Dante. “We’re fighting back.”

Lexi motioned for Dante to follow Kat and closed the door behind them.

She studied Dante’s face, his expression indifferent as Kat spun the tale of how The Order was the last and only line of defense that stood between humans and demons. Lexi thought that Dante was handling all of the information well until he snorted, swiping dust off of a bookshelf and rubbing it between his fingers. He was mocking them. The only reason he had come with them at all was because he hadn’t wanted to deal with the police when they inevitably caught up to him.

His eyes went wide as they entered the larger work space, looking around as Order employees in lab coats flitting between high-tech equipment and monitors, continuing to collect intelligence on demon collaborators, undisturbed by their appearance.

And then they were standing before the final door, the one that led to Vergil’s office. The moment was upon them now. Inevitable. Make or break. What if Dante rejected Vergil? Refused to help them? What then of the plan?

After years of careful planning on Vergil’s part, everything would come down to Dante’s compliance, and he didn’t exactly have a record of complying with anyone.

Lexi stayed back with Kat as Dante caught sight first of Vergil’s mask, then of the man himself. Neither brother said anything, the weight of their meeting completely lost on Dante as he sauntered into the middle of the room.

“Amazing…!” Vergil exhaled.

If Lexi thought that Dante looked like his brother earlier, then she was sure of it in that moment. They were mirror images of each other. Vergil was a smidge taller, Dante’s hair a deep black to contrast his brother’s silver, but they had the same facial structure and the same piercing blue eyes.

“Dante – it really is you.” Dante shrugged. “You don’t remember me?”

“No,” he clipped, looking aimlessly around the room. Anywhere but Vergil.

“How much of your childhood do you remember?”

“Uh, not much. I had meningitis when I was seven – wiped my memory – why?”

Vergil let out a laugh, “They told me I had a car accident that resulted in total amnesia. Age: seven.”

“Your point?”

Vergil stepped out of the shadows to approach his brother, “Meningitis is a human affliction. You are not human, Dante. All war is fought with deception and you have been deceived. Your past has been hidden from you for a reason.”

Vergil was ripping the fabric of Dante’s reality apart and he did not like it. No one was surprised when he straightened to his full height, jabbing a finger into Vergil’s chest as he went on the offensive, “Rewind a bit – who are you again?”

Prepared for every possible outcome, Vergil composed himself without missing a beat, “My name is Vergil. I established The Order to help find a way to fight the demons.”

“Besides swords and bullets, you mean.” Dante bit back sarcastically; Lexi fought the urge to roll her eyes.

Vergil persisted, he had to win his brother over, but Dante was beginning to get the wrong idea: becoming convinced that Vergil wanted to use him to do his dirty work, and fight his battles for him. He wasn’t a pawn; he didn’t want to be a piece in Vergil’s game. 

“Well, you guys seem really nice,” Dante looked around the room, his tone mocking, “but I’m more of a loner type: trust issues, work alone – that kind of thing.”

“Dante,” Kat moved forward, “I don’t think you understand what is at stake.” Vergil held out his hand to silence Kat, but Lexi was undeterred. They had just risked their lives to save him and he was barely giving them the time of day.

“He does, he just doesn’t care.”

With another motion of his hand, Lexi fell silent. She crossed her arms and shifted her gaze from Vergil to Dante’s self-satisfied grin, jaw clenched as she held his gaze before turning her eyes away with a scoff.

“If you want to leave – turn your back on me, I’m powerless to stop you. But you’ll be making a grave mistake. Not just for yourself, but for mankind.”

“For mankind?”

“Yes!”

“What makes you think I give a shit?”

Vergil couldn’t answer that one. Dante didn’t give a shit, that much was clear, but he would once he knew who he was. Once he knew that it was personal.

“At least give me a chance to show you.”

“Show me what?”

“Who you really are.”

Silence, but then, “One chance.” He left no room for argument, ready to walk out the door at any minute.

One chance was all that Vergil needed. Game, set match. Just like that, he had Dante exactly where he wanted him. He nodded like they were still playing by Dante’s rules and the tension in the room eased.

“You must be tired. You can stay here if you’d like, since the Hunter destroyed your trailer. It’s safest that way.”

“Where’s the couch?”

The idea of making his brother sleep on the couch made Vergil chuckle, “That won’t be necessary, we have a room for you.” He nodded at Lexi, “Lexi will show you. I took the liberty of grabbing you some essentials when I heard about your trailer, they’ll be on your dresser. Make sure you get some rest, Dante; we leave tomorrow morning.”

Dante didn’t have a snarky response, so he half-assed a wave in thanks. He hadn’t slept on anything but his lumpy mattress for years. He followed Lexi wordlessly as she walked out of the room, stopping in front of the first in a long line of doors.

“This is you. Bathroom is just across the hall.”

He opened the door, scanning over the toothbrush and other essentials Vergil had grabbed him to land on the bed. He fought against the smile that pulled at his lips, the bed looked damn comfy, a definite step up from his trailer. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad.

“Sleep well, Dante.”

He shut his door with a click.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated 8.03.2020


	4. Paradise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dante is sent into his childhood home to learn who he really is. Lexi is sent along to babysit.

Lexi opened the fridge, passing Vergil a bottle before taking her own. They ran further that morning, Lexi having grown used to their previous distance and pace. Her lungs heaved as Vergil encouraged her to match his stride, he said that the exhaustion was all in her head, but she was just glad that it was almost over.

That day, they were taking Dante to Paradise Manor, the ruins of an old estate that had once been the twins’ home. Vergil had found the answers he needed there and he was certain that Dante would find them as well, and once his brother remembered who he was, they could put The Order’s plan into motion.

Lexi passed Kat on her way to the shower, raising her hand in a weak wave. She returned to the kitchen to receive her mug from Kat and took a long sip.

“Thanks, Kat.” The medium smiled, taking a sip from her own piping mug.

Vergil reentered the kitchen with a disheveled Dante in tow. Kat passed each of them a thermos as they made their way to the car. Despite its back row, the coupe was not made for four people. Kat and Lexi had filed into the back, trying to make themselves comfortable while the much taller boys sat up front, hogging all of the legroom.

“Where are you taking me?”

Vergil started the car, “You’ll find out soon enough.”

* * *

_Paradise_.

The sign was overgrown with ivy, falling apart much like the wrought iron gate that had once guarded the long driveway. Lexi studied the old estate as they approached, doubting that Dante could find anything in the house – tetanus, maybe; but something useful, probably not. She kept her opinions to herself; Vergil had not steered her wrong yet.

“This was your home.” Vergil stated, leading the group into his old home.

“I don’t remember it.”

“You will,” Vergil assured before turning to Kat. “Kat, open the gateway.”

Kat unfurled her template and broke out a spray can. Dante knelt beside her, running his finger through the spray on the floor as he asked Kat what she was doing. He sniffed at his fingers, revolted.

“Doesn’t smell too good. What’s in the can?”

“A compound I created based on an old Wiccan recipe. Sea salt, shark oil, iron shavings, desiccated squirrel semen, wolf hair…”

Dante wiped his fingers off on Lexi’s back. She gagged.

“The house holds secrets,” Vergil addressed his brother before nodding towards the gateway. “I’ve found mine, now it’s your turn.”

Dante confidently stepped onto the gateway. This would be the first time he entered Limbo of his own volition. “How will I get back.”

“We’ll take care of that. Just be careful, it can get rough down there.”

“I like it rough.” Dante quipped, eyes on Lexi as her ears grew hot.

Kat had never seen Vergil roll his eyes so hard.

Kat wondered aloud if this was going to work. She wasn’t normally one to question Vergil, but Lexi silently admitted that she shared some of Kat’s doubts. Vergil reminded Kat that she had been raw too when he found her which caused the medium to drop her gaze at the reminder of her tortured past.

Next, Vergil turned to Lexi, “Go with him. Make sure that he finds everything he needs to.”

“He doesn’t need a babysitter.”

“Lexi.”

“He’ll be fine. How would I even know when he’s found what he’s looking for?”

“You’ll know.”

Arguing with Vergil was pointless. She sighed as she stepped into the gateway, hurrying once again to catch up to Dante. He was in a great hall, the ceiling mostly caved in, the stained glass shattered. It must have been beautiful once, but now it was little more than ruins. Even now, in its demise, it held a certain ethereal beauty hidden between the silence and the rot.

Dante hadn’t noticed her, busy talking to himself and reaching out to caress a portrait on the far side of the room. _Sparda. Their father?_

Lexi was pulled from her observation as a death knight clawed through the floor. “Dante, behind you!”

She launched herself at the death knight, its shield easily deflecting her attack and forcing her to roll out of the way of its counterattack. Dante attacked the death knight next as stygian spawned at Lexi’s sides. By the time she had defeated both of the stygian, Dante had smashed through the death knight’s shield with Arbiter and launched it into the air. Whipping out her pistol, Lexi shot at the airborne demon, barely missing Dante as he jumped and finished the death knight off with a smash into the ground. He sheathed his weapon as it turned back into a sword.

Dante turned to her as the demon evaporated. “I knew you couldn’t resist all this,” he motioned to himself.

She rolled her eyes to keep them from lingering on Dante’s toned physique and crossed her arms over her chest, “Vergil sent me. Thought you could use a babysitter.”

Dante lifted an eyebrow, “And you always just do what he says?”

Though she tried not to show it, Dante’s question had given Lexi pause. She trusted Vergil’s leadership, trusted him with her life – surely that was different than following him blindly. How could she expect Dante to understand that she trusted Vergil with her life when he had never been able to trust anyone but himself?

They continued to make their way through the sprawling manor, demons spawning and forcing them to work together. Dante came to a stop at the bottom of a staircase, something catching his attention as he surveyed the room around them.

“Did you hear that?”

Lexi reached for her gun in the ghost-silent room and shook her head ‘no.’ On alert, she followed Dante as he was led up the stairs and into a decaying bedroom where his eyes continued to follow some unseen specter across the room. He knelt at the foot of a bed and picked up a small wooden shield.

“That was me! I remember this!”

For a moment, he seemed lost in thought, captivated by the wooden shield, but he came back to himself when Lexi laid a hand on his shoulder.

“You good?”

“Yeah. Let’s see what else this house has got.”

Dante ran out of the room, stopping short as something grabbed his attention down the hall; clearly tracking something invisible to her own senses across the room. She felt out of place, walking through this once-loved family home, following Dante as he tried to tape together the pieces of his broken past.

“What the hell happened here?”

**_STOP HIM._ **

The ground ripped apart as demons spawned around them.

“You get the ones on the ground; I’ll get the others!” Dante called as he ripped a shield from a bathos. Lexi immediately started firing at the stygian nearest her, dispatching it before it could raise its blade. A second stygian attacked her from behind, but she dodged and rounded on it with a kick that sent is sprawling back toward the edge of the building. With a barrage of short-range attacks, the second stygian went up in a cloud of smoke.

Dante pointed across the chasm that used to be the front hall at the other side of the manor. “We need to get over there.”

They jumped between piles of floating debris, thankful that the spaces were short enough to jump.

Dante ran through the large doors to the other wing of the house, but stopped short in front of another portrait, this one of a beautiful woman holding a blue rose. _Eva_. A shiver ran up Lexi’s back, cold as ice, and the hair on the back of her neck stood on end. She turned on her heel, but once again nothing was there; still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something otherworldly was among them.

When she turned back around, Dante’s sword had changed once again – this time into a scythe, Osiris.

Stygian spawned in the room, but they were no match for the newest weapon in Dante’s steadily growing arsenal. He took on three easily while Lexi disposed of a fourth.

A blue rose lay on the ground in the next room. Dante froze, staring into space with the ethereal flower wrapped within his grasp. Noise from the other side of the room signaled the appearance of a death knight.

Readying her gun, Lexi moved between Dante and the demon. “This would be a real good time to snap out of it, Dante!”

He didn’t.

Approaching the death knight from the side, Lexi fired off a couple shots to draw the demon’s attention away from her prone charge, hastily abandoning the gun in favor of her short sword when the death knight lunged for her. She ducked under the death knight’s wide swing and took aim at its unprotected side. The death knight pushed her back and roared.

Lexi regained her footing and dashed around the demon to attack from behind, sweeping it off of its feet. She jumped into the air and brought her blade down as hard as she could through the death knight’s smooth mask. A blast of demonic energy rushed past her as it died.

When she turned back to Dante, he had moved from the rose to stand over an old family photo.

“I remember…” he murmured, his face unguarded as he brushed away dust and bits of loose glass from the photo.

Limbo undulated beneath them as Dante stood mystified by the family photo. Another shudder caused Lexi to spring into action.

“You found what you’re looking for, we need to go!”

They sprinted back through the manor, Limbo changing at every turn in an effort to keep them trapped. Windows shattered as they stepped into the gateway together, Lexi crowding against Dante as the floor gave an unholy lurch and they rematerialized in the real world.

Lexi took a step back, giving Dante space as his eyes found Vergil.

“You’re my brother.”

A small smile turned up the corners of Vergil’s lips, “Your twin brother. I’ve been looking for you for a long time now.”

Dante, for once, had nothing to say. He stood there listening to Vergil and absorbing every word like a sponge.

“I want to know more. Where we come from, what happened to us. Above all, I want to know who is responsible for all this.”

Vergil followed his brother out of the house, the two already making up for lost time as Lexi gave Kat a nudge, “I guess that means he’s in.”

_Bingo._


	5. A Leap of Faith

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A spotter drags Dante into Limbo. Once he’s back, the gang goes over Vergil’s plan to take down the demons, and Lexi does a little planning of her own.

Vergil parked beside a concrete park and everyone filed out of the car. A small merry-go-round sat off-kilter, rusting in a pile of scrap metal while a lone swing set squeaked in the slight breeze. Like the manor they had just left, the park was in disrepair. Lexi studied the graffiti on the walls surrounding the park as she and Kat hung back, observing the brothers as Vergil spun his recount of angels and demons and Nephilim, the spray-painted story matching Vergil's so precisely that it couldn't have been coincidence. Maybe he had commissioned a local artist to paint their history around the empty park? 

Green eyes shifted to Dante. He had been distant, cold, coarse, when they had found him, but already there was a shift in his demeanor as he realized that they were all on the same team. He was drinking from the firehose now, absorbing as much of Vergil's knowledge as he could, and slowly the frown etched into his lips relaxed and his brow unforrowed; oblivious to the world outside of him and his brother.

A bump brought Lexi back to reality. She was about to apologize, taken by surprise at the shoulder-to-shoulder contact, but stopped when she saw Kat’s grin. The medium nodded toward Dante, “He’s cute.” Lexi gulped, he was. There was no use denying it. She wasn’t _blind_ , and Kat _had_ caught her staring red-handed.

“I didn’t think he would be your type.”

“I have a type?”

“Everyone has a type,” Kat snorted, “I thought Vergil would be yours.”

Before her world had turned to shit, Lexi would have thought so too. Vergil was exactly the type of man she had always expected she would go for – intelligent, ambitious, respectful, cultured –, the kind of guy her family would fawn over, but she had never felt a spark for anything beyond their steadily growing friendship; besides, she was almost certain Kat harbored feelings for their boss.

“Don’t worry, I won’t say anything.”

“Good. He doesn’t need a bigger ego.”

“All that confidence,” Kat teased, smile broadening, “I bet his ego isn’t the only thing that’s big.”

Lexi’s jaw dropped in a scandalized gasp, her face going scarlet as Kat laughed at her embarrassment. A comeback caught on the tip of Lexi’s tongue as the image of Dante standing naked in front of his trailer assaulted her – broad chest, thick arms, tapered waist. She groaned; Kat definitely wasn’t going to let this go.

Lexi’s embarrassment flared at the reappearance of Vergil, quickly disappearing when she realized that he was alone.

“Kat! A spotter pulled Dante into Limbo. I need you to get him out of there!”

Kat sank to her knees to prepare a gateway, smirking as Lexi stepped through. “You find Dante, I’ll find a way to get you both out.”

Lexi found Dante in a courtyard with a fountain at its center. She whipped out her pistol and took aim at the demons surrounding the Nephilim.

“Here to babysit?” Dante sassed, ripping the shield away from a bathos.

Ignoring him, Lexi launched herself forward to help with the remaining demons. The throaty rev a saw’s engine grabbed their attention as a ravager charged toward them. Dante jumped out of the way leaving Lexi to raise her blade at the last second in a block, the force of the ravager’s blow forcing her to take a knee. The squeal of metal on metal filled the square as the ravager’s saw chipped away at the softer metal of her short sword before Dante used his grappling hook to pull the ravager off of her and launched it into the air.

“You good?”

“Fine,” but the blade was not. A deep, ugly groove had been carved into one of her cutting edges; the human steel too soft to withstand the ravager’s attack.

Lexi dodged the next charge, managing to hit the ravager from behind before Dante finished it off.

“Lexi! Dante!” Kat waved them over to a gateway, but nothing was ever that easy. Limbo shifted, the road before them lifting to form a blockade before plummeting into the abyss below.

“Guess we’ll have to find another way across,” Lexi mumbled as Dante eyed the jump. He must have decided that it was too far to chance because he turned back around and headed out of the alley.

They were attacked again as they neared the fountain. Dante went left; Lexi, right. The lesser demons hadn’t stood a chance nor the ravager after them, Dante finishing it off with a twirl of Osiris.

Limbo continued to taunt them. Walls screamed for them to **_COME CLOSER_** , and Dante was taking the bait. Lexi stood by as he used his grappling hook to propel himself into the air, jumping from platform to platform until he reached the top of the fountain. Lexi was then tasked with defending Dante as he picked the worst time to space out again.

Two bathos and four stygian.

Lexi raised her short blade over her shoulder, throwing it through the head of the first bathos before dodging a stygian and shooting at the bathos that remained. She’d have time to worry about the stygian once Dante was safe. A stygian nicked her shoulder, sending her stumbling forward after she finished off the second bathos. She pivoted and fired a round into the stygian’s face, kicking it backwards before retrieving her blade from where it had fallen after the first bathos had disappeared. Blade in hand, she launched herself at the remaining stygian.

Dante joined her as two death knights spawned, killing the first before helping Lexi finish off the second.

“Kat,” he called, “we’re on our way.”

Lexi sheathed her sword, “Did you find another way out?”

“We don’t need one.”

Dante sped up as ran toward the partially-collapsed. Lexi held her breath as he reached the end of the road and leapt, but he made it to the next platform with room to spare. “Come on.”

Lexi shook her head and backed away from the endless blue of the abyss, “I can’t.”

“Yes. You can.”

“It’s too far! I won’t make it!”

“I won’t let you fall,” he promised, widening his stance to keep himself grounded in the event that she jumped short and he needed to reach out and grab her.

She backed up to give herself a running start, eyes never leaving the abyss.

“Don’t look at it. Don’t think. Just take a deep breath and jump.”

Lexi took several deep breaths to center herself. She trusted Vergil and Vergil trusted Dante. She could trust Dante. At the very least, she believed him when he said he wouldn’t let her fall.

There was no use in drawing it out. Sprinting forward, Lexi steeled her nerves and propelled herself over the divide, dashing through the air.

Her foot touched down on pavement as Dante had told her it would, but he hadn’t moved out of the way in time to avoid a collision. Out of instinct, his hands reached out and caught Lexi around her trim waist. He smiled down at her, “Told you you’d make it.”

Dante released Lexi to jump across the next divide, Lexi following him more confidently the second time. They fazed out of Limbo together, Lexi hyperaware of how their arms brushed against each other in the small confines of the gateway. She still felt Dante’s hands around her waist where he had steadied her moments ago and she fought the strong urge to look at him. She should have waited for him to faze out first.

“You made it!”

Lexi shot Kat a smile and stepped out of the gateway. “Of course we made it. Couldn’t let you go on saving the world without us.”

Kat checked Lexi’s hip with her own before turning to Dante, “Vergil grabbed the car. Let’s get you out of here before another spotter finds you.” Lexi fell into step beside her friend as Dante allowed himself to be led away from the park, his eyes on Lexi.

“I think I’ve had enough excitement for one day,” Lexi smiled, checking her friend back. But she was lying. Her day had just begun.

* * *

Once they returned to headquarters, Vergil corralled everyone into his office. Now that Dante had remembered who he was, he had to be clued in. There was much to discuss.

Vergil had been working meticulously for years to orchestrate the downfall of Mundus, he knew the plan inside and out, but Dante – and to a lesser extent, Lexi – was still in the dark. That had to change. The twins lost their jackets and crowded around a monitor. Lexi wasn’t proud of the way she stared, but she was weak to the way that Dante’s muscled shifted beneath the artificial glow of the computer monitor and powerless to look away when he tilted his head back and lifted a can of Virility to his lips while he focused on Vergil’s presentation.

 _Bzzt._ Her phone buzzed in her pocket.

 **Kat:** _at least try to be subtle_

The medium’s eyes remained pointedly on the computer screen as if nothing had happened. Lexi followed her lead.

“The way he keeps us docile is a… little more insidious.”

Dante lifted the can back to his lips, “What is it?”

“It’s in your hand,” Lexi interjected, ignoring Dante as he looked her way, then worrying that this only drew more attention to her earlier staring.

“Planet Earth’s most popular soft drink, Virility. The demons have spiked it.”

Dante spat the drink out on the floor before tossing the half-finished can in the trash. Kat wrinkled her nose.

“It’s okay! It has no effect on us. Only humans. It’s lobotomy in a can.”

Now soda-less, Dante crossed his arms over his chest – _damn!_ She was staring again –, “So, what’s the plan?”

Vergil was all too happy to oblige him and continued on with his presentation. Mundus drew his power from the Hell Gate, but without it he was powerless. In order to defeat him, they would have to draw him away from the Hell Gate long enough for it to be shut down.

Dante stood from where he leaned against the desk, to stand between Vergil and Kat, “Okay, so to kill Mundus we need to drag him away from the Hell Gate. We do that by pissing him off.”

“Roughly speaking, yes,” Vergil gave him a half shrug.

“And we piss him off by taking out Raptor News Network and Virility?”

“That’s it.”

“Which one do you want to do first?”

Had Kat ever seen Vergil so pleased before as he was now, with his brother at his side and ready to help him take down Mundus? A soft smile split his face as he tabbed over to the next slide and dove into his plans for the Virility Factory and the demon that resided there. Once Vergil was done, Dante decided that it was time for pizza.

“I’m not eating that green shit that I saw in the fridge this morning. We’re ordering pizza.”

With a look at Kat who only shrugged, Vergil acquiesced.

“What do you guys want?” Vergil and Lexi promised to eat whatever he ordered, and Kat requested a small veggie lover’s pizza for herself. “I guess we don’t order delivery, huh?”

“No.”

“Alright. I’ll pick it up. Get out. Stretch my legs.” Dante raised his arms over his head in a full body stretch looking expectantly at Vergil who rolled his eyes and handed Dante more than enough cash to cover both pizzas plus a tip. He caught Lexi’s eyes on the sliver of skin that had been revealed during his stretch as he turned to leave the room, “Try not to miss me too much.”

 _Caught._ Damn Kat and her giggling.

Once Dante left, the rest of the group dispersed. Lexi retired to the sofa in the common area and whipped out her phone. She startled when Kat sat down on the other side of the sofa, subtly readjusting herself so that she could be sure no one else saw her screen, but the medium was only interested in her silent companionship, content to settle into her side of the sofa as she jotted notes in a well-loved book on wiccan recipes. Lexi returned her attention to her phone – finalizing details before she was set to sneak out that night.

Putting her phone away, Lexi reached for the TV remote, “You mind?” When Kat shook her head ‘no,’ Lexi turned the TV on and lowered the volume, flipping through the channels for something decent to watch, but it was that awkward time between daytime and nightly programming which meant there was only one thing playing: news. When Lexi had first caught Vergil watching the Raptor News Network, he had said that to achieve victory The Order had to know their enemy as well as they knew themselves. It made sense, as with everything Vergil did, but that never made tuning into Bob Barbas’ never-ending news segment any less taxing.

She was saved, however momentarily, by the arrival of pizza. Vergil appeared in the kitchen to grab a slice before returning to his office, Kat followed him with her small pizza and her book tucked under her arm, thanking Dante over her shoulder as she went to see if there was anything she could do to help. Lexi let out an amused huff, and Kat thought _she_ was obvious.

Barbas was like a warped version of Rumpelstiltskin, spinning bullshit into news. When Lexi returned to the sofa, he had begun reporting on the “terrorist attack” at the Bellview Pier. Dante dropped onto the sofa next to her.

_“Police are asking the public to remain vigilant – further terrorist attacks could take place anywhere, anytime, and when you least expect them. With more on what you can do to prepare yourself in the event of another attack, we turn to-.”_

“How can you watch this shit?”

Lexi considered Dante out of the corner of her eye as he stuffed more pizza into his mouth. It was a wonder he was as toned as he was with the way that he ate. “Vergil says that to win the war we need to know our enemy.”

Dante made a general grunt of understanding around his pizza and Lexi turned back to the TV. Barbas’ voice stretched between them, big in the small space.

“So, what’s your deal?”

Lexi blinked, “My _deal?_ ”

“Yeah,” the pizza box lay forgotten in Dante’s lap as he kicked his boots up on the coffee table. “Vergil’s a super genius, Kat’s a medium – what’s your super power?”

There was no reason to hide her heritage from Dante, they were going to be working together after all, but the words still felt foreign rolling off her tongue, “I’m an angel.”

“Of course you are,” Dante chuckled. His grin fell when Lexi turned back to Barbas’ babbling, “An _angel_ , angel?”

“Yeah.”

“No shit. Don’t angels normally have…wings?”

“Not this one.”

Dante was silent for a beat, “What happened?”

“I don’t know.”

Thankfully, he left it at that. Lexi turned off the TV before Barbas could sign off. She took another small bite of her dinner as her thoughts drifted back to her late-night plans, but Dante was still sitting on the opposite side of the sofa, still looking at her. She cleared her throat and changed the subject away from herself, “Earlier today, in Paradise, you said that you remembered… what did you remember?”

Something flickered in Dante’s eyes and Lexi was worried that she had overstepped – avoided his invasive question with one of her own. She opened her mouth to apologize – it really wasn’t any of her business –

“I remembered my mother. Her name was Eva.” He reached up subconsciously to touch the red pendant hanging around his neck. “She gave me this. I… We were a family, but then the demons found us, and when they broke in, I saw him. _Mundus._ She gave her life so that we could escape. You know the rest – Sparda split Vergil and I up, we got our memories wiped.”

Silence stretched between them again as Dante trailed off. Lexi hadn’t expected him to answer her question, and now that he had she wasn’t sure how to respond to something so personal. She couldn’t say that she was sorry, he wouldn’t want her pity. A ‘fuck you’ would have been easier to respond to. Instead the moment to say something stretched long, turned stale, and passed. Lexi checked the time on her phone – she still had a couple of hours to kill until she snuck out. She got up from the sofa and tossed the remote to Dante, thanking him for the pizza as she headed to her room and, supposedly, to bed.


	6. A Late Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lexi sneaks out in the middle of the night.

All noise beyond Lexi’s door had ceased with the light click of a nearby door – Kat’s – at quarter to eleven, but it wasn’t until just before midnight that Lexi felt confident that she could slip into the night undetected.

She tied her hair up and dressed all in black. Muted by the cushiony press of her socked feet, she crept down the polished concrete of the dark hallway, pulled on her boots, and slipped into the warm summer night. Hood up to disguise her auburn locks, Lexi blended into the shadows as she made her way toward the financial district. She worried that she had made a mistake in not warning Vergil, but she dismissed the idea as quickly as it came – she didn’t need his help, she could do this on her own.

A hand shot out of the darkness, manhandling her until she was pressed into the unforgiving surface of a brick wall, a second hand covering her scream as she struggled.

“Hey Lex.”

Her body tensed, the gloved palm lifting from her lips as she recognized her captor’s voice and became still. She glared daggers as her eyes came to focus on his face, “Let me go.”

“You’re not as sneaky as you think you are,” Dante drawled as he kept her pinned to the wall. “What’re you doing out after bedtime?”

“None of your business,” she hissed, precious time slipping through her fingers even as they tightened into fists. “I need t-.”

“Oh, I think it _is_ my business,” he fired back, digging her shoulders further into the wall as she tried to move past him. “What’s so important, huh? Got an appointment? Somewhere to be?”

If he thought that she was sneaking off to sell out The Order to demons then he was stupid. What did he think that they would do to her once they got what they wanted anyway? She interrupted his line of questioning, hoping that the truth would literally set her free, “I’m breaking into the auction house!”

“What?” Clearly, he hadn’t been expecting that answer.

 **“** They’re auctioning off a weapon tomorrow,” she rushed, “An angel’s sword. It’s extremely rare and this is the only night I could be sure that it’s even in the building, and if I don’t get it now, I might never find another. _So, will you_ _please get off of me_.”

Dante whipped his hands off of her as if he had been burned. _Good_. He should feel like an idiot for calling her loyalties into question.

“So, what’s the plan?”

“Like I said, none of your business.”

Dante laughed – actually _laughed_ – at her. Lexi glared.

“I’m coming with you.”

“No, you’re not. You’ll just get me pulled into Limbo. This whole thing would be faster if you’d just–,” _fuck off,_ “– _leave._ ”

But to her extreme displeasure, Dante sauntered past her, “Auction place is this way, yeah?”

That was the moment that Lexi knew her plan was about to be blown to shit. She let out a defeated sigh and jogged past Dante, making up for lost time.

Lexi led Dante down an alley to a door mostly-hidden from the surrounding streets and prying eyes. She motioned for him to keep quiet and dropped to a knee, pulling out a lock pick from her jacket pocket, “We get in, find where they’re keeping the auction items, grab the sword, and get out. Quietly. No distractions. No Limbo.”

Dante crossed his arms as he watched Lexi work at the lock for an unseemly amount of time before it dawned on him.

“You’ve never done this before.” It wasn’t a question and he wasn’t talking about her lack of lock picking prowess – though it was definitely about that too –, she had never broken into anything.

Lexi’s shoulders tensed as she redoubled her efforts on the lock, “The movies make this look a lot easier.”

Plucking the pick from her fingers, Dante moved Lexi out of the way and took her place, unlocking the door with a practiced ease. He pushed the door open with a smug smirk and motioned her forward, Lexi moved past him into the still darkness of the auction house. She took a moment to let her eyes adjust to the darkness as Dante let the door shut behind them, surprised but relieved that no alarms had been tripped.

“I go this way; you go that way. Let me know if you find anything.”

“What are we looking for?” Dante’s hushed voice startlingly loud after Lexi’s own whisper.

She held her finger back up, fixing him with a pointed look, “A locked door or a vault or something. They wouldn’t leave their most valuable items on the show floor.”

“More locks? Good thing I stuck around, then.”

Lexi scoffed, an angry embarrassment taking over her as they moved toward opposite ends of the auction hall. Display cases lined the room, lesser, more replaceable objects left in the glass overnight while a select few cases containing more valuable artifacts had been emptied after the evening’s open-house had ended. Lexi approached the auction block when the silence was shattered.

“I think I found something!”

The chairs set in the middle of the room were swept to the side by a mighty breeze as the ground rumbled.

“Seriously, Dante?”

“You told me to let you know if I found something!”

“Holy shit – I meant _come get me_ not _fucking yell!”_

**_STOP THEM!_ **

Lexi ducked behind a display case, a bathos’ laser ricocheting off of the glass to stun one of its companions. She whipped out her fun and emptied her clip into the bathos’ face before turning to the next while Dante, still on the other side of the room, disposed of his own group of demons with a flourish.

Gun in hand, she approached Dante. Her hood had fallen during the scuffle, red locks catching the moonlight as it came loose and fell across her face – she brushed it back.

“Door’s locked,” he supplied.

Irked that they had been dragged into Limbo, Lexi stepped around him and shot at the lock twice, no longer worried about being quiet. The door relaxed in its frame, swinging open onto a flight of stairs.

“Think it’s in the basement?”

Lexi nudged the door open further with her boot, gun pointed into the darkness, “Only one way to find out.”

Moonlight filtered into the basement through several windows placed high up on the walls. Lexi’s mood turned once again as she spied a vault – she should have asked Vergil for help in acquiring the blade, anything was better than the smug look of satisfaction Dante shot her as he hefted Arbiter over his shoulder and brought it down on the vault with a deafening crack. The metal door bowed inward, a gap appearing where it had once sealed the vault shut and she squeezed past the thick metal before Dante could say something witty about her plan being a bust without him.

She made her way through the vault by the light of her phone, checking each item as she passed before she found what she was looking for in the back.

The blade lay beside its sheath on a display bed of blue velvet. The pommel, like the scabbard, was cast in bronze, the blade leaf-shaped and short with a line of runes engraved down the fuller. Reaching out, Lexi took a deep breath and lifted the blade from its pillow, grasping the pommel firmly in her right hand. She waited for something to happen – anything at all – but there was nothing. No movie magic moment. No power thrumming through her. No sparks. No sense of belonging. She must have looked like an idiot staring at the blade and waiting for it to do something – she certainly felt like one.

Lexi sheathed the blade, brushing her disappointment aside and securing it over her shoulder before picking her way back to Dante.

“Found it?”

Lexi nodded, twisting to show Dante the scabbard secured over her shoulder.

“It got a name?”

“No,” she was sure that it did, judging by the runes, but she had no way of knowing what that name was and giving it a new one didn’t feel right.

**_THIEF! STOP THEM._ **

The staircase exploded as a ravager ripped its way into the room, obliterating the exit with its saw as a hell knight and death knight spawned on the opposite side of the basement.

“Time to see what that thing can do,” Dante smirked as he drew Rebellion. “Dibs on the hell knight.”

Holding the pommel with both hands, Lexi brought the blade in front of herself. The ravager revved its engine and Lexi pivoted out of the way as it charged with its saw above its head. When the ravager’s attack stalled, she launched an attack of her own. Lunging for the demon with her sword down by her right leg, Lexi used every muscle in her body to launch the ravager off of the ground and into the ruined staircase. Her body moved as something else were controlling her strings, but she felt more in control of herself than she ever had before. Holding the blade in her hist like a hammer, she crouched and spun flinging the sword after the ravager and piercing it in the shoulder only for the blade to rematerialize in her open hand as if she had never thrown it. A big, toothy grin split Lexi’s face.

Lexi lifted her weapon again and let it fly, this time stabbing the ravager through the abdomen. She threw again, dodging out of the way of the death knight as it came for her back and making a dash for the ravager as she recalled the blade one last time, finishing it off with a well-placed strike across its front.

Turning, she caught sight of Dante ripping away the death knight’s shield before moving in for an attack with Rebellion. He threw the death knight into the air, juggling it with shots from the girls. Lexi jumped, both hands gripping the pommel as she drove her sword through the demon and into the ground, killing it.

She sheathed her new blade as they resurfaced into the muted tones of the real world, already looking for another way out of the basement when the alarm rang; shrill in the otherwise quiet night.

“We need to get out of here!”

“On it!” Dante took off his jacket and wrapped it around his fist, breaking one of the basement windows and laying his jacket over the pane once the glass was gone.

“You can’t just-!”

“Yeah, well I did! Come on!”

Out of options. Out of time. Out of the window.

Lexi accepted Dante’s help as he laced his fingers together to give her a boost before catching the windowpane and hauling himself onto the street. He shook out his jacket as sirens wailed their approach in the distance, then grabbed Lexi’s arm, “Run! Let’s go!” Someone had to make sure they didn’t get caught, and from her deer-in-the-headlights expression, he could tell that it wasn’t going to be Lexi.

They made it a block before Dante slowed. The sirens had gotten too loud, they couldn’t outrun the police cars. Thinking fast, he changed tactics, hurrying them both into the shadow of a nearby building and crowding Lexi up against the wall. He supported himself above her with a strategically placed arm that would hide both of their faces from the street once he leaned in close.

“What are you doing?” Lexi whispered as Dante’s other arm wrapped around her waist and coaxed her body to press into his own. Her heart pounded against her chest as their bodies slotted together naturally, her skin lit aflame everywhere they touched in the close quarters.

“We can’t outrun them, but if we look _busy,_ they should leave us alone.”

Lexi gulped, completely out of her depth, but where she was inexperienced, Dante had done this song and dance before: the lockpicking, the thieving, running from the police.

“Busy?”

“Touch me.”

“What?”

“Holy shit, just touch me,” Dante released her waist and moved her hand over his chest, “They’ll stop if it looks like I’m assaulting you”

Lexi conceded and moved the hand on Dante’s chest up to drape over his shoulder and fist in his jacket, the other moving to play with his hair of its own accord, pulling him closer as his hand returned to her lower back. Their lips were a hairsbreadth away and Lexi felt herself getting lightheaded as Dante’s hot breath fanned across her face. She swallowed, her throat dry, “You’re not actually going to…?”

Dante’s eyes flickered from her own down to her lips, lingering there and finding that he wasn’t opposed to the idea, “Do you want me to?”

Red and blue washed over them, a police car rolling to a stop as it saw them and Lexi’s breath caught in her throat for a completely different reason. When it looked like the cruiser wasn’t going to move, Dante grabbed her leg and wrapped it over his hip, Lexi following his lead, arching further off the wall and fisting her fingers in his hair with a loud whine – from fear, surprise, or want, she wasn’t entirely sure.

With a wolf whistle and a laugh, the lights faded into the night. Dante released Lexi from his grasp and took a step back, allowing them both to slip back into the street and down a side alley as they made their way back to The Order. And if Lexi’s cheeks were flushed, she would blame it on their fast pace.


	7. Virility: It'll Kill Ya

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which subtlety is spelled "D A N T E."  
>   
> OR  
>   
> Dante, Kat, and Lexi get caught up on their way to the Virility Factory.

Coincidence didn’t bring Lexi by the auction house the next morning, Vergil did. Yellow crime scene tape blocked off the lot and adjacent alleyway and police cruisers parked around the block. Lexi had told Vergil about her new, unnamed sword and how it came into her possession as they stretched before their run. Despite the previous night’s hang-ups, she was proud and wanted to share the success of her first solo mission. For his part, Vergil hadn’t been quick to point out that she had been woefully underprepared to break into the auction house, first complimenting her ability to find and collect the blade – happy that it ended up in Lexi’s hands instead of some demonic collector’s – before insisting that she come to him before setting off on her own again. He left the fact that her plan would have failed without Dante’s interference unspoken, but the truth of the matter hung heavy over her head.

Kat’s eyes flitted to Lexi as the runner stepped around them to toss Vergil his water bottle, unknowingly grabbing Dante’s full attention as she pressed a second water bottle against the back of her neck before cracking it open. She hid a wry smile behind her coffee mug, turning to ask Vergil about his run while leaving Dante to gawk.

Conversation completely forgotten; Dante’s eyes wracked over Lexi. She was toned from weeks spent training with his brother and whatever else she had done before joining The Order. His gaze swept up her long legs and the flat plains of her stomach to her neck as she gulped her cool water, droplets escaping her lips to mingle with sweat and run torturously into the bright spandex of her exposed sports bra.

Vergil snorted, drawing Dante’s attention as Lexi left the kitchen.

“What?” Dante challenged.

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit.”

The amused smile remained on Vergil’s lips as Kat took the opportunity to slip out of the kitchen and give the twins their space.

“Drawn to the angel,” Vergil stated once they were alone. “How very father-like of you, Dante. I suppose it must run in the family.”

Something deep within Dante stirred, gnashing its teeth and snarling not at the comparison to Sparda – he knew he was nothing like their father – but at how his brother had concluded that the attraction must run in the family. Vergil was family. Dante did his best to keep a calm look about him as he considered what his brother had said. Was that why he ran with her every morning? Was he interested? And if he was, how was Dante supposed to compete? Vergil was educated, wealthy, he had a future; Dante had the clothes on his back and the money he’d pocketed after the pizza run.

“…I think you should go for it.”

“Huh?”

“Neither of you have been exactly subtle,” Vergil smirked. “You are Nephilim, she’s an angel. It makes sense that you would be drawn to each other.”

“Back up. You’re encouraging this?”

“I don’t see a reason not to, so long as your intentions are pure.”

Dante scoffed, “What are you, her father?”

The smile fell from Vergil’s lips as he took on a more serious tone, “No, but Lexi is an important part of The Order and we will need her by our side once Mundus is defeated. If you were planning to use her to satisfy your carnal urges,” he sneered, “then I’d suggest you look elsewhere.”

The conversation died and they sat in silence until Kat walked back into the kitchen with Lexi in tow, the angle’s thick hair pulled back into a braid to keep the drying strands out of her eyes. Vergil bid them good luck on their mission as they parted ways; he to his office and they out of the compound.

* * *

The streets were relatively empty as they made their way to the Virility factory on foot, having abandoned the car some blocks away – Kat would come back for it while Lexi and Dante were occupied. They managed to keep a low profile until Dante brashly slapped a soda can out of someone’s hand.

“It’ll kill ya!”

Lexi turned to admonish him and Kat pulled her hood further over her eyes. They were supposed to be _discrete_ , but Dante obviously didn’t understand the meaning of the word. She was pulled into Limbo alongside Dante who groaned his annoyance.

“What did you expect? You did the same thing last night at the auction house!” Lexi snapped.

“What happened?”

“They’ve dragged us into Limbo,” Dante informed the medium.

“Yeah, ‘cause someone couldn’t keep his hands to himself!” Lexi murmured, searching the area for whatever had drawn them into Limbo. She found her answer in a writhing demonic camera – little more than a serpentine eye on a worm-like body. “The cameras must have been looking for us. We’ll have to take them out.”

**_KILL THEM._ **

“Here comes trouble.”

Kat left them to find a safer spot as lesser stygian spawned beneath the camera, but they were taken down with ease.

“I’m going to get up there and rip that thing apart,” Dante seethed at the camera before doing just that. He scaled the nearby buildings using his grappling hook once he was in range to rip the eye off of its mount and splatter it against the nearby wall.

Dante dropped to the road and the two jogged until the pavement before them crumbled and fell away.

**_NO._ **

“Woah,” Dante smirked at Lexi. “Someone doesn’t want us here.”

“The city itself is trying to stop you,” Kat explained as she approached from the side. “Vergil sent me the camera locations for this area. Best avoid them if we can.”

Lexi agreed, “Lead the way.”

Demonic shards coalesced at the back of an alley, Dante and Lexi each firing round after round into the spinning disk until it exploded. They caught up to Kat in an empty courtyard.

“Sorry, we got held up,” Dante apologized as they caught up to Kat in an empty courtyard.

The medium’s head swiveled, nervously assessing the buildings on either side of the road as they began to quake. “This isn’t good.”

“What’s happening?”

Understanding dawned on Kat just before the first buildings crashed together behind them, “It’s the walls! Get out of here!”

They took off at a breakneck pace, making it through the gauntlet unscathed except for Lexi’s jacket which the buildings had managed to catch the tail of and refused to let go. She shook her arms free of the loose jacket with a grumble and let it fall limp against the buildings.

Dante narrowed his eyes and equipped Osiris as Lexi reached for her own sword as a frost knight rose to meet them from the cobbled stones of the courtyard.

Lexi threw her sword at the demon’s head, but it dodged and blasted her with ice, freezing her in place. She cursed her luck, teeth chattering as she worked to break free. Frost knight defeated, Dante and Lexi were barraged by wave after wave of lesser demons, each wave a bigger nuisance than the last.

After Dante disposed of the second camera, Kat called them over to a side alley. She pulled out her spray can and shook it as Dante chuckled.

“Never seen a witch use a spray can before.”

Humble to a fault, Kat looked down at her feet and shrugged, “Spells can take hours if not days to prepare, so why not can them for instant use later?” Kat acted like her spray cans were no big deal, like Vergil was the only genius at The Order, but Lexi thought that she was brilliant in her own right.

“Where’d you learn this stuff?”

“Vergil taught me the basics of demonology and occultism, turns out I had a natural talent for it. Said it would help me to focus on something constructive instead of…”

Dante pressed her, though not unkindly, “Instead of what?”

Kat’s eyes grew distant and her smile fell from her lips as she finished tagging the wall, “Instead of focusing on the nightmares.”

_Woop-woop!_

The chirp of a police siren spurred Kat to throw the spray can into its holster. She promised to find them later and get them out of Limbo.

Using the painted tag, Dante pulled a platform out of the wall and climbed up to destroy the last camera, the event sending shocks through Limbo and causing the streets around them to go haywire.“Run!”

Walls threatened to crush them again as they sprinted by, chunks of pavement falling away into nothing. Lexi’s feet skidded out from beneath her, catching herself on a hand and scrambling into the building to her right when the world tilted. Swept off of her feet, Lexi slid uncontrollably toward a stained-glass window with Dante right behind her.

Ebony or Ivory rang out behind her, cutting spiderwebs into the glass as Dante reached out for her with his right hand.

“Lex!”

His fingers closed around air, barely missing Lexi as she crashed through the weakened glass first and into Saint Agares’ Church.

_Crack!_

Lexi screamed, crumpling to the floor. Her hands flew to her ankle as her face scrunched in pain.

“You okay?”

Dante crouched over her as she fought to blink back hot tears. Her ankle wasn’t twisted in an odd angle – probably thanks to her boots – but the crack had been unmistakable even through the cacophony of shattering glass, “I think I just broke my ankle.”

Rolling up the bottom of her legging to see that red had already began to creep up her leg as the joint began to swell. She grit her teeth and tied her boot tighter, knowing that removing it would only encourage the joint to swell more.

“Let’s get you out o-,” pews flew into the air and cut Dante off.

_So much for hallowed ground._

“Go. I’ll be fine,” Lexi pulled out her pistol and took aim at the demons from her position on the ground. Pain radiating up from her ankle messed with her aim but she managed to both defend herself and contribute to Dante’s fight by shooting down two bathos.

Dante appeared at Lexi’s side as she tried to push herself off of the floor. Her leg had swelled above the collar of her boot, but the pain wasn’t dissipating as her body worked overtime to heal itself during battle. That did not mean – as she found out – that she could put weight on it yet.

Dante crouched down and slung her arm over his shoulder, steadying her as he called out into the silent church, “Kat, you there?”

No response.

“Can you hear me?”

Instead of Kat, a tyrant answered his call. The bulky demon grunted at the front of the church as Dante leaned Lexi against a wall.

“Who invited you, fat ass?”

The tyrant stamped its foot at the provocation and charged at Dante while Lexi tentatively added more weight to her injury. When Dante was clocked by one of the tyrant’s heavy fists, she took her chance and unsheathed her sword, letting it loose at the tyrant’s exposed back before it could hit her downed teammate.

The tank turned its attention toward her in slow motion. With a roar it stamped its foot and charged.

Closing her eyes tight, Lexi brought her arms up to shield herself and recoiled as she prepared for the blow, but it never came. When she opened her eyes, the tyrant lay at her feet, disappearing in wisps of black smoke, Arbiter embedded between its plate armor.

“Can you walk?”

She bit her lip and nodded as she shuffled away from the wall and waved off his help, “I’ll be fine.”

“Dante, Lexi! It’s chaos out here, but I found a way out!”

“Where?”

Kat pointed to the gateway set high up in the stained glass at the front of the church, but before Lexi could ask how they were supposed to reach it the marble floors of the church ripped open to put as much distance between Dante, Lexi, and the gateway as possible.

“Run!”

Lexi grit her teeth as she limped forward in a sad excuse for a run and approached the first gap in the ground. Pushing off of the ground with her good leg, she managed to dash half way across the opening before she was falling. She wasn’t going to make it this time.

Dante caught Lexi around the waist and carried her over the divide, twisting to take the brunt of the fall on his side and sparing Lexi any further injuries. Adjusting his hold on her so that one arm hooked beneath her knees, he stood and reached for his grappling gun, “Hang on!”

Wrapping her arms tight around Dante’s neck, Lexi buried her face into his collarbone, her heart beating frantically in her ankle as Dante left the ground and propelled them through the gateway.

Colored glass rained around them outside of the church as Dante landed light on his feet. He lowered Lexi to her feet as the steeple crashed down behind them, her green eyes meeting his own amid the chaos.

“Thank you.”

“Told you I wouldn’t let you fall.”

Kat shook Lexi from the moment as she pulled her out of Dante’s loose grip and hurriedly helped her walk away from the church and prying eyes.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

Lexi smiled at her friend, hobbling down the street as more people started to gather in the square, “Just got to walk it off. I’ll be fine by the time we get to the factory.”


	8. The Secret Ingredient

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The trio storm the Virility Factory. Dante and Lexi fight a succubus.

Virility owned the largest building in the industrial district: a daunting, multi-storied brick structure flanked by dulled steel drums. Lexi’s ankle was stiff with residual swelling as they cut through the parking lot, but the pain was gone.

Kat peeked at Lexi and Dante from beneath her hood as they approached the front entrance, “Okay, here we go. Through the lobby and up the escalators.”

“And this time, Dante,” Lexi smirked, “try to be discrete.”

He sneered.

The high ceiling of the lobby was barrel-vaulted, daylight bathing the room in an inviting glow. At first glance, what with the cartoon Virility balloons and plain green banners, nothing hinted at the insidious goings-on of the factory.

“I was here years ago as a child. I explored the whole factory unseen,” Kat checked to make sure that no one was listening in before continuing, “I sensed a demon under the factory. The Succubus, an ancient one. We believe it’s the source of the psychotropic ingredient.”

Dante drew a blank, “Psycho-wha?”

“It’s what they use to control us.”

“Oh.”

 _“Welcome, visitors, to the Virility Factory.”_ A cheery disembodied voice interrupted, prattling over the loudspeaker as Lexi stepped onto the escalator behind Kat and Dante. _“-and best of all, it has been scientifically proven to improve weight loss by 21%, and enhance sexual performance by 63% if drunk daily.”_

“How do people actually fall for this crap?”

“If you’re told something is true often enough-”

_Bzzt! Bzzt! Bzzt!_

An incoming call tore Lexi’s attention from her teammates. She reached into her pocket, blindly sending the call to voicemail. And then another. She turned the device off – if it was important, they’d leave a message. No one called besides telemarketers anymore anyway. She needed to focus on the succubus now, she could check her phone later.

Stepping off of the escalator, they turned down free samples of soda from some poor sap in a caterpillar hat and made their way toward a door marked _Employees Only_ , “The succubus is hidden deep inside the factory, but there is no physical way to reach it from our world. Only through Limbo,” she explained, cracking the door open. “This way. There’s a rift inside.”

Kat must have downplayed how often she explored the factory as a child, she hadn’t been there in years, but it was obvious from how quickly she navigated the labyrinth that she knew it like the back of her hand. They came to an abrupt stop in the export bay. The medium looked around, confused, “I expected it to be bigger, a lot bigger… But then, I was just a chile when I was here. And I was in Limbo.”

“What were you doing here?”

“Escaping my nightmares.”

“You came to Limbo to escape your nightmares?” Lexi elbowed him in the ribs and shook her head ‘no,’ but Kat met his eyes unflinchingly.

“Yes,” she marched further into the bay, leaving Dante behind as she went to prepare the gateway.

Concern turned the corners of Dante’s lips down as Kat marched further into the bay to prepare the gateway. He looked at Lexi and mouthed, ‘what happened to Kat?’ but she pursed her lips and shook her head; she didn’t know.

‘Nothing good.’

“Once you’re in Limbo, all you have to do is retrace your steps back to the mixing room.”

Approaching Kat, Lexi nodded, “That doesn’t sound so bad.” Over her shoulder, Dante agreed. It sounded too easy.

“Maybe, but the demons may sense you when you’re in Limbo, so stay alert.”

“And once we reach the mixing room?” Lexi asked.

“You’ll descend deep down into the factory.”

Dante smirked and stepped onto the gateway, “And kill me a succubus. See you on the other side.”

Fear coursed through Lexi’s veins when she fell through the floor beneath the gateway. Laughter bubbled from her lips after her descent was stopped by a crate. She shook, giddy with adrenaline, “You were right, Kat. It’s a lot bigger in Limbo!”

“I’ll be waiting for you in the mixing room. Be careful.” And after cleaning the spell from the floor, Kat left the export bay before anyone could find her snooping.

Motioning to the path floating before them, Dante urged Lexi on, “Ladies first.”

One crate at a time, they climbed their way back to the spot where Kat had left them, fighting small groups of demons along the way and following the living pipes that pumped demonic goop toward the tasting room. A leak sprung from one of the pipes, a puddle of green goo sizzling across the metal floor. Fumes rose and tickled Lexi’s nose as she stepped around it, wrinkling her nose, “So, this is what we were drinking?”

In the real world a secret ingredient tank stood in the middle of the mixing room, but in Limbo the tank was a pulsing, organ-like mixer. Pipes spread across the room like veins, pumping the emerald lifeblood of the factory into the mixing tank and feeding it into the suckling mouths of the demonic sample tanks that lined the room. She gagged.

“What in the shitting hell is going on here?” At least she hadn’t been the only one thrown for a loop.

Kat appeared and motioned to the organ-like structure, “ _That_ is the mixing process… But it’s the source we’re interested in.”

“So, the succubus we’re after is on the other end of that?” Lexi questioned, pointing at the globular _thing_ in the middle of the room.

“That’s right. This way.”

Doors slammed shut, a black substance hardening over the last viable exit.

**_FINISH THEM._ **

“Shit. Dante, incoming!” Lexi took a fighting stance.

“Give us a minute, Kat.”

“Be careful!”

Acidic goo sputtered across the floor as stygian spawned, followed soon after by a ravager. Lexi took on the stygian with gun and sword while Dante annihilated the ravager only for a hell knight to take its place. Dante released Arbiter and brought the axe crashing down on the hell knight’s head with a satisfied yell. His blue eyes crinkled at the corners as he offered Lexi a crooked smile, butterflies fluttered in the pit of her stomach and she smiled back. They were getting the hang of this – working together.

Her butterflies died at the appearance of two tyrants, her smile wiped away, “You have got to be kidding me.”

“Which one of you fat asses wants to be Limbo’s biggest loser?”

Lexi goaded a tyrant into charging across the room, effectively breaking the two demons apart so that they could be handled separately. Going in for the close attack, Lexi hit her tyrant with a series of blows before it crouched and charged again. Unable to dodge out of the way, she was thrown across the room, but managed to roll to her feet in time to sidestep the following two-fisted slam.

The tyrant righted itself with a huff and set to charge Lexi again, stunning itself as it crashed headfirst into a tasting tank and causing toxic goo to spill out from between the cracks in the glass. With a hit from behind, the tyrant slipped and fell to its front. Taking her chance at the demon’s exposed back, Lexi plunged her sword between the plate armor, using all of her strength to sever its spine. Unable to regain its feet, the tyrant mustered one final swing of its big arms and lay still.

She jogged to the sidelines where Dante and Kat waited for her beside a newly-cleared door. Kat slipped through first, winding them through a different hallway until they reached a dead end. Had they taken a wrong turn?

“This tunnel will lead you to the succubus. You can only get there from Limbo. I can’t follow.”

Before them was a straight drop into a giant metal fan – hardly a tunnel, more of a chute. Lexi’s eyes bulged, jumping into the tunnel would be suicide.

Beside her, Dante also regarded the fan with skepticism. He leaned over the opening to get a better look, “How do we get down there?”

Kat pulled an egg-timer out of her bag and held it proudly in front of her, “I made a spell from a variety of-.”

“I don’t need to know.”

With a glance between Dante and Lexi, Kat cut to the chase: “You jump, I twist.”

“Are you serious?”

“You’re questioning Kat _now?_ ”

“She wants us to jump into a blender.”

“Trust me,” the medium smiled.

With once last glance at the fan, Dante backed his heels up to the tunnel’s ledge, Lexi hesitated before moving to stand beside him, their eyes meeting briefly as Lexi faced the tunnel head-on. She gulped, drying her sweaty palms against her leggings – despite what she had said and her faith in Kat, she was still nervous as hell.

Dante reassured her with a nod and squared his shoulders. With more confidence than any one person should have possessed, Dante turned to Kat, “We jump, you twist,” gave her a half-hearted salute, and let himself fall off the ledge.

Knuckles turning white, Lexi forced herself after Dante before she could talk herself out of it and he could get too far away. Kat set the egg timer, each twist reorienting Limbo until the concrete chute turned into a slide and then ground beneath their feet.

“You don’t have long, hurry!” Kat warned as demons spawned in front of them. Dante reached over his shoulder for Rebellion, but Lexi dodged around both him and the demons, continuing to run for the next platform.

“Leave it! We don’t have time!”

The egg-timer released a shrill ring as they reached the end of the tunnel. Dante flung the vault door open with his grappling hook and the two jumped to safety before Limbo could dump them into the fan.

Fumes hit them hard after the vault door slammed shut, the smell thick enough that even after Lexi had plugged her nose, she could practically taste it on the back of her tongue. Silence overtook them as they continued forward, to where the tunnel opened up into an impossibly big lair. Marble statues of women in various stages of undress lined the stone bridge. Landing on the bridge, it became apparent that the orange magma-like sludge gurgling and spitting beneath them was the source of the smell.

Beyond a lofty doorway wriggled a figure, it wasn’t until they got closer that Lexi comprehended that the figure was the succubus. Her mouth fell open. When Kat had said succubus, _this_ was certainly not what she had expected. The creature before them hung upside down, suspended by three thick cables as it spewed orange bile into the chamber. Its body bore more resemblance to a giant caterpillar or a slug than a seductress.

Dante sauntered forward, completely unfazed, “So you must be the secret ingredient!”

With a grumble, the succubus stopped what she was doing and lifted the fatty lump over her head with a bony claw, “Who are you?”

“I’m your prom date, you ugly sack of shit!”

Lexi bit the inside of her cheek to cover a laugh, snorting at Dante’s provocation. The succubus wasn’t amused – she moved faster than either Dante or Lexi expected, finding purchase on enough stone to drag herself within spitting distance of Dante’s face.

“WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU!?”

Projectile vomit spewed from the demoness’ maw, causing Lexi and Dante to separate, dodging to either side to get out of the way.

Dante laughed at the succubus, taunting her further, “You missed! This is Lex – say hey, Lex -.”

“Sup.”

“-and my name, by the way, is Dante!”

Recognition gleamed in the demon’s cloudy eyes, “Dante? Son of Sparda? And Eva the whoooorrrreeee?” Dante mocked her with a half bow, dancing out of the way of more bile and ending up next to Lexi.

“Yep. But you can call me Dante the demon killer,” he turned to Lexi with a cheeky grin. “Has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

“Love it.”

“You want to kill me? You can’t kill me! I’m twelve hundred years old!”

“You don’t look a day over twelve thousand.”

“Fuck you!”

“Fuck you.”

“FUCK YOUUUUUU.”

Gnarled hands clung to the edge of the stone platform. Lexi and Dante moved forward together, separating to take on two each as they tried to batter the demon off of their platform.

“Did you have to piss her off?”

Dante barked a laugh, “Ah, don’t be like that!”

Swiping at them with her claws, the succubus worked her way further up the stone, roaring as she missed her targets and sending out a blast of energy that threw Dante and Lexi backwards. Recovering quickly, Lexi moved to the platform to her right before the succubus could cover the lair’s entrance in acidic bile.

Ignoring Lexi, the succubus chased Dante to the left, leaving her back exposed as she yelled, “AAAGH! I’m going to pull off your arms and legs, chew them up, and puke them out all over your pathetic face!”

Lexi grinned up at the unguarded cords dangling just out of reach. She nibbled on her bottom lip as she lined up a throw and let loose a quip of her own, “Don’t listen to her, Dante. I like your face.” Her blade soared through the air, slicing through the first cord like butter before catching in the next. The succubus shrieked and turned to face Lexi as if realizing for the first time that the Nephilim was not alone. Lexi threw her blade again, this time catching the succubus in the hollow of her sunken cheek.

The succubus released Dante’s perch, shaking the stone beneath Lexi’s feet as she found purchase there instead and raised her fist to smash the platform, forcing Lexi to jump between small bits of suspended debris to reach yet another outcropping. This time, the succubus followed her, clawing after her in a huff and carving a thin line into her arm, “I’m going to smash your angel whore to bits, you pathetic pile of pus!”

“Whore?” Lexi scoffed as pain blossomed beneath her shoulder, blood trailing down her arm even as the wound worked to heal itself, “That’s rich coming from a succubus!”

“All of you angels are the same!”

Dante leapt to Lexi’s side, coming down on the succubus with a well-timed slash from Arbiter before he switched targets and weapons to attack her claws with Rebellion. A fist to the face sent the succubus reeling back, knocking her grip free so that he could rip the nicked cord free. Only one cord left the demoness suspended above her demise.

A wounded howl shook the lair to its foundation. Dante crowded Lexi to one side of the platform, one hand ready to grab her while the other hovered over his grappling gun, ready to move to the last remaining platform when the succubus inevitably began to smash their current one to bits in her ire.

“You disgusting fuck child!” the succubus screeched, “I’m going to pull off your head, piss down your neck, and shit on your worthless carcass!”

“Promise?”

“AAAAGH!”

Before the succubus could grab them, they were gone. Once released, Lexi moved to the back of the platform to set up for a series of ranged attacks while Dante patrolled the front for a close-up assault. After a flurry of powerful attacks, the succubus collapsed before them.

Grabbing ahold of the succubus’ face with his grappling hook, Dante pulled the demon free of her last tether. Grooves raked into the floor as the succubus tried to avoid her inevitable plunge into the sick, but the stone buckled and gave way beneath her immense weight.

“You’re dumped.”

“Shame. You two were cute together,” Lexi clapped Dante on the shoulder in mock sympathy, “But there are plenty of fish in the sea. You’ll find someone.”

Dante snorted, amused as they sheathed their weapons and turned to leave, jogging out the doorway and past the first line of marble statues when the succubus burst through the floor. The demon aimed a fist at Dante that nearly landed, but he dodged the blow with a flip and instead the succubus only took out the floor where he had been standing.

“Dante!” Lexi screamed, relaxing once she saw that he had landed on a chunk of fallen stone floor that stuck out from the river of molten bile, but her relief was short-lived. The succubus resurfaced before him, sputtering.

“I told you… you can’t kill me!”

Dante fought the succubus again, jumping from stone to stone and pushing the succubus closer to another blender-like, metal fan.

“You know what your problem is?” Dante asked rhetorically as the succubus clung to a brittle stone pillar – she was weak, barely hanging on –, “You’re too clingy!”

With a final blow, the succubus’s grip broke. She scrambled for purchase on anything, but there was nothing left and she was dragged into the fan screaming as Dante delivered a final, punchy line, too quiet for Lexi to catch.

Squatting down as he turned, Lexi braced a hand against smooth stone and reached a hand out, “Come on. I’ll help you up.”

“You sure you got me?”

“I’m stronger than I look.”

Warm fingers wrapped around Lexi’s wrist and she braced herself, ready to take on his weight and haul him up. Dante was heavier than she thought he would be, he was lean, but he was all muscle. She shifted her weight back, her muscles straining as she refused to let go. When Dante found purchase to lift himself the release of tension caused Lexi to stumble back.

Before she could fall, Dante pulled her close. She was dizzy from the rush of adrenaline through her veins and her almost fall. Her palm tingled, growing hot where it was pressed against Dante’s wrist.

Dante’s eyes caught on her tongue as it peeked out to wet her full bottom lip. He itched to catch it between his teeth. When she released him to wipe her palm against her leg and step away, he followed her. “So, you like my face, huh?”

Wide moss green eyes met his stormy blue as Lexi’s head rose in embarrassment at the acknowledgement of her earlier quip.

Blushing, Lexi ducked her head and took another step back before she could be distracted by Dante’s crooked smile and the small scar below his right eye, “Yeah, I-I mean…” she searched for a clever response but trailed off, floundering. She was saved as chunks of rock and marble crashed into the sick below them, the platform rocking uneasily from the lost weight and resulting waves. Lexi cleared her throat and ran with the distraction, “We, uh… We should get back to Kat.”

“You know the way out?”

“I think I saw a ladder over there.”


	9. Of Rooftops and Pizza

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lexi steps out to clear her head and gets more than she bargained for.

Lexi rushed ahead of Dante so he wouldn’t witness the blush that worked its way from the tips of her ears down her neck. She mentally kicked herself for offering to lift him up when he could have easily found his own way back onto the platform, and then tripping like an idiot. But the damage to her ego was done and to top it off, now she couldn’t stop thinking about how warm his hand had been through the leather of his gloves or his charming, crooked smile.

When they made it out of Limbo Kat was waiting for them in the parking lot, the car already running. Content to take up the backseat in its entirety, Dante climbed in first.

Lexi dug her phone out of her pocket and turned it back on as Kat pulled away from the curb, surprised to find that she had six missed calls from her aunt, Norah – the woman who had raised her –, and a dizzying number of unread texts. Had something happened? Was someone dead? She scrolled to her aunt’s texts.

**Norah:** _Pick up your phone._

The next message came with a video attachment.

**Norah:** _Come home. We can fix this._

Lexi turned down her volume to be mindful of Kat’s call with Vergil and pressed play.

 _“The police have released footage of the terrorist responsible for the recent attacks at Saint Agares’ Church. He goes by the name of Dante, seen here with his known accomplice, Alexis Moore.”_ CCTV footage rolled from earlier that day, a rare moment of Dante and Lexi loitering in one of the streets surrounding the old church before the steeple had come crashing down.

“Look, we’re famous,” she passed the phone to Dante in the backseat.

The grease stain that was Bob Barbas continued, _“Remember their faces, people. If you see them, inform the police immediately, but do not approach. Dante has a history of physical violence and is a known sexual deviant. This is Bob Barbas, just doing God’s work.”_

“You okay?” Dante was used to the attention and the slander, but all of the negative attention was new to Lexi. She gave a noncommittal shrug, her lips turned down and brows furrowed as she accepted her phone back, staring at it. What was she supposed to say to Norah? _The news is run by demons, I’m one of the good guys?_ No. Even if there was a chance that Norah would believe her, she would be safer in the dark.

Lexi scrolled through the rest of her missed messages, contemplating throwing the device out the window, but it had been too expensive for her to just throw away; better an expensive paperweight than broken on the side of the road. Instead, she hastily selected the messages, deleting them before she turned the device back off.

“See you soon, Vergil,” Kat ended her, prompting Dante lean forward and rest his elbows on the center console.

He looked between the women in the front seat, “You all seem tight. How’d you guys meet him?”

“Is it relevant?” Kat asked, eyes on the road.

“I’d like to know who I’m risking life and limb with. He’s my brother and he’s trying to save the world. What’s your story?” Tension built as silence returned to the car.

“Listen,” Dante started over, choosing his words carefully, “I never asked for your help, but you gave it and I appreciate it. I trust you. Both of you. You can trust me too.”

Kat shifted uncomfortably before she removed her hood, her carefully constructed walls following. Her voice was distant, like she was trying to separate herself from her past even in its recount, “Vergil rescued me. I was in a foster home. My foster father was a demon. He attacked me most nights. I had to get out.”

Realization hit Dante and Lexi at the same time, “The nightmares…”

“It’s okay,” Kat assured them, her voice wavering, “I felt nothing. I couldn’t physically escape so… I found another way. I aimlessly wandered Limbo in spirit form. And I found Vergil there.” She smiled at the memory of her own personal savior, “He heard my cry for help. He helped me to deal with the demons, both figuratively and literally. I killed the bastard. Now I want to deal with them all. You’re gonna stick with us to the end, right?”

“Count on it.”

* * *

Vergil greeted the trio as they filed back into the order, the tension from the car successfully broken. He was pleased to hear that everything had gone according to plan – going so far as to indulge Dante in a high-five. The succubus was dead, a solid hit to Mundus and his cohorts.

After a long shower to scrub away the succubus’s secretions, Lexi crawled into her bed and draped an arm over her eyes. She released a deep sigh into the room as she recalled the news report Norah had sent her.

“There go my hopes for med school.” No school was going to accept a _terrorist_ into their program. Certainly, no school worth going into massive amounts of debt for.

Two fitful hours later, she gave up on sleep. Swinging her legs over the side of her bed, Lexi changed out of her pajamas and waved goodnight to the handful of workers still at their stations as she made her way out of the compound and onto the street, hoping a walk was what she needed to clear her head.

Left to his own devices, Dante’s mind had drifted back to the conversation that he’d had with his brother that morning. Vergil thought he, what, _liked_ Lexi? She was hot, sure, he would give her that, but what Vergil was talking about was for saps, and he wasn’t a sap. He was no more interested in Lexi than he was in any attractive woman, he told himself as he stared up at his bedroom ceiling. There was no subconscious pull towards the angel and he would prove it to himself and his brother: all he had to do was go to the club, find a hottie or two, and fuck their brains out. Yeah, that was it – he just needed to get laid.

Dante abandoned his half-baked plans when Lexi turned out of the alley ahead of him. He followed her at a distance until she reached an unfamiliar building along the edge of a park, watching as she jumped to grab ahold of the fire escape and pulled herself up. The ladder shifted with a rusty whine when he grabbed ahold of it, Lexi’s eyes shooting to him in surprise before she relaxed and moved onto the roof.

“Couldn’t sleep?” he settled beside her on the angled roof.

Lexi shook her head, unbothered by his surprise appearance, “I used to live in this building with my aunt – well, I guess she’s not really my aunt,” she chuckled dryly, “she’s human – but she raised me. She told me that my mom left me on her doorstep when I was a baby and just… disappeared. I always hoped that she would come back for me, but…”

“She never did,” Dante understood even though a part of him always knew that his parents weren’t coming back.

“It’s hard to miss someone you’ve never known, but…” Lexi trailed off with a sad smile. “When I couldn’t sleep, I would climb up here. On clear nights, I could see the stars. God, I was such a cliché!”

Dante tilted his head up, but the night sky was obscured by a thin layer of clouds.

“Earlier you asked Kat and I how we met Vergil. I was taking a test when the proctor dragged me into Limbo the first time. Kat heard me screaming for help, dragged Vergil to the university to find me. A demon sliced my back open, so they brought me to The Order to patch me up but it healed itself. That’s how Vergil figured out I was an angel – I didn’t even know. He thinks that my parents ripped my wings out before they left me with Norah; says that must be how I slipped under the demons’ radar for so long.”

“So you come here when you can’t sleep.”

“It used to be the only place that felt like home.”

The closest Dante had ever come to home was his trailer. He’d always felt outcast, caught between two worlds. He was a loner-type, after all. But the last few days spent running with his brother, Kat, and Lexi had made him feel like he belonged somewhere for the first time since Sparda had wiped his memory.

A breeze rolled across the roof and down through the park, rustling through the trees and tugging at Lexi’s loose shirt. Lexi shivered, first from the cold then again when Dante drew her into his side, goosebumps that had nothing to do with the breeze blossoming beneath his touch. Dante radiated warmth like a furnace, his embrace heating Lexi through the thin fabric of their shirts.

Moonlight filtered through the clouds casting the night in a soft glow as Lexi observed Dante through her lashes, studying the line of his strong jaw, the way the breeze had tousled his hair, and how blue his eyes were even in the dark. Leaning further into his side, she reveled in his closeness, her breath catching in her throat as the energy from their night on the run returned, fizzling and popping between them.

Dante was unable to deny the magnetic pull that he felt toward her, but was unwilling to admit that Vergil had been right. Again. But they were so close he could practically feel her lips on his. Lexi let out a stuttering breath, her tongue peeking out to wet her full and brushing ever so slightly against his own.

Fuck it. Dante threw his restraint out the window, and gave in to temptation, leaning in to capture her lips with his own.

The kiss started uncertain and soft, but quickly grew in intensity as Lexi relaxed, groaning as she clung to Dante’s broad shoulders, eyes closed and dizzy with want. She groaned, when Dante nipped her bottom lip and tangled their tongues together, realigning their lips as he shifted Lexi backwards and covered her body with his own.

Arching off the roof, Lexi brought one hand to knead at the muscles of Dante’s firm chest, the other tangling in the short strands of his hair with a tentative tug. Dante broke the kiss to suck in a breath before diving back in to kiss Lexi hard, rucking up her shirt to reveal the smooth skin of her stomach. He was a man starved, trailing kisses down her neck as he greedily grabbed at her small waist before moving a hand down to squeeze her ass and bring their hips together.

A quiet but very present moan escaped Lexi as the heat of Dante’s arousal rubbed her through their jeans. Dante swallowed the next noise, their teeth clacking together as he rolled his hips against hers again and the hand in her shirt moved higher to cup her breast through the delicate material of her bra.

Lexi tried to catch her breath when Dante’s lips left her own and nibbled at her collarbone. Wrapping a leg over Dante’s hip, she rocked back against him, delighting in the friction and the heat that flooded between her legs, “Dante-.”

Lips crashed against hers, cutting off whatever she was about to say with a swirl of his tongue. He moved down Lexi’s neck as she broke her lips away from his and turned her head to the side, baring more creamy skin for his teeth.

“I’ve never done this before.”

“Never done what? Fucked on a roof?” Dante teased, delighting in Lexi’s hiss as he bit lightly at her pulse. “Me neither, but there’s a first time for everything.”

Lexi shook her head, face twisted in pleasure, and that’s when it hit him.

He lifted himself off of Lexi and took her in as he sat back on his heels – hair fanned around her like a red halo in the light of the mon, lips stung, shirt askew. _No_. “You’re a virgin?” He wasn’t sure if he was more scared or turned on by the revelation. Shocked.

“Please don’t say it like that,” Lexi whined trying to pull Dante back to her, but the moment had slipped away into the night.

“But you _went to college._ ”

“Yeah, I was pre-med. I didn’t have a life outside of class and study groups. Life isn’t a porno, Dante, not everyone is a slut in college.”

Dante laughed as Lexi pouted and crossed her arms over her chest, her blush darkening across her cheeks when her stomach growled. Dante stood and offered Lexi a hand, “Come on, let’s grab some food.”

Pizza, it turned out, was about the only thing that was still open. They found a joint that sold pizza by the slice and Lexi grabbed a seat along the outside wall while Dante went inside to grab food. He reappeared with pizza in one hand, and two brown bags in the other.

Lexi stared at the paper bags, scandalized, “We can’t drink _beer_ out here. That’s illegal.”

“So was breaking into the auction house,” Dante chuckled. “Besides, that’s what the bag is for. You don’t have to drink it if you don’t want to.”

Lexi dug into her pizza as her stomach rumbled, tentatively washing it down with the beer. Her heart fluttered when Dante smiled and lifted his own beer in a salute before taking a long sip.

“So,” Dante started, “what did you do before all this?”

Their conversation flowed easily as they knees knocked together, talking about their lives before Limbo, angels, and demons. How Dante had been brought up in the system and how he had finally managed to escape and buy his trailer. Lexi’s own upbringing was painfully normal by comparison – she had grown up in a loving family with a handful of friends, playing club sports, going to sleepovers, and dreaming of what she would grow up to be; unaware of the danger that lurked in the shadows, a darkness that Dante fought against every day.

“So… you been saving yourself for marriage or something?”

Lexi huffed a laugh around her bite of pizza, “Oh God, no!”

She was magnetic, and sitting beside her, with her cheeks painted pink from laughter and alcohol, Dante didn’t understand how she remained so pure while everything else in this damn city had been corrupted. “What, then?”

“It’s stupid, really.”

“Try me.”

Lexi met Dante’s eyes, the little bit of alcohol in her system making her bold, “I just… never found someone I wanted to be that close to before.” But she wanted to be close to Dante. Craved it. Was drawn to him like a moth to a flame.

They walked back to The Order after Dante had finished off Lexi’s second slice, their hands brushing against each other and bringing a small smile to Lexi’s face. She took the lead through the garage and scanned them into the compound. They moved silently through the empty halls until they reached their rooms.

“Goodnight, Dante.”

Dante chuckled, a small smile pulling at his lips. “Night, Lex.”

Lexi was out like a light as soon as her head hit her pillow.


	10. A Day Off

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vergil prepares for the next phase of The Order’s plot to bring down Mundus and gives the gang the day off.

Sweltering. They day had barely begun and it was already sweltering. Lexi and Vergil returned to The Order after an unusually short run. Vergil, who always wore long sleeves to protect his fair skin, had taken his shirt off and both runners were dripping with sweat. Lexi smirked when she caught Kat’s eyes sweep over their boss as she started working on a pot of coffee. Dante was nowhere to be seen – probably still asleep.

Lexi guzzled one bottle before grabbing another from the fridge and holding it against the back of her neck as she walked off to take a cold shower.

Upon returning to the kitchen, Lexi filled a cup with ice and poured her steaming coffee over the top. Delays in preparations meant that they had been given the day off – a rarity in life at The Order.

Before long, Dante entered the kitchen and fell into the seat next to Lexi, mindful of the distance between them. Since they parted ways the night before, she had been all he could think about. She was different, a stark contrast to the easy women he was used to picking up in clubs – smart and kind and naïve. His hands itched to pull her seat into his, to wrap his arm around her shoulder as he had before. Instead, he lightly knocked their knees together under the table, meeting her eyes as they flickered in his direction before moving to Kat.

“What’re we up to today?”

Kat smiled, “Depends. Got the day off.”

“No shit, really?”

Lexi hummed, “Yeah, got the word from Vergil earlier. You got any plans today, Kat?”

Kat nodded, “I’ve been meaning to pick up an order from my supplier so I can make another batch of the gateway spell. The order came in last week, I just never got around to picking it up. You?”

Lexi shrugged. What was she supposed to do now that she had been labeled a terrorist? She couldn’t exactly call up her friends and ask if anyone wanted to go out. “Dunno. Maybe just stay inside and read that thing Vergil shot me.” That _thing,_ as Vergil had explained when he bestowed it upon her, was an expert’s translation of an ancient tablet on angels. Vergil had acquired it on a whim, hoping that it would help him better understand himself, but he was Nephilim; he hoped that it would be of better use to Lexi, but there was no way of telling, she hadn’t gotten around to reading through it.

“Well,” Kat suggested, “you could always come with me, you know. I can always use an extra set of hands.”

Lexi agreed readily enough, the two standing up to head to the car.

“Have room for one more?” Dante had already been unceremoniously tossed and locked out of Vergil’s office, and he couldn’t imagine anything more boring than sitting around the compound as Vergil’s nerds typed away, working on whatever the fuck it was that they did.

Kat smiled and waved for him to follow them to the car, he jumping in the backseat as the women settled up front. Kat tried for most of the ride to convince Lexi to help her with the actual concocting of the spell while Dante absentmindedly tugged on a lock of Lexi’s hair that fell over her seat, the resulting tingle causing Lexi to pull her hair over her shoulder as she shivered. Pleased with her reaction, he met her look in the rearview mirror and let his hand drop, smirking.

On the outskirts of the coast-side of town, Kat pulled over and killed the engine. Her supplier, it turned out, was also a florist – because of course he was – who acquired and sold a large assortment of wiccan ingredients and artifacts out of the cellar of his flower shop. After a hasty introduction the supplier led them to his basement. It was dark, illuminated only by black grow lights and the sunlight filtering through the stairwell. It took two trips for Lexi and Dante to grab all of Kat’s boxes and get them situated in the trunk of the car while Kat got wrapped up in a conversation about the supplier’s latest acquisitions.

Outside, heat rose from the sidewalk in visible waves as Lexi and Dante lingered by the car. It wasn’t even noon; the day was only going to get hotter. Lexi kicked herself for not thinking to grab the keys from Kat so that they could at least sit in the airconditioned car while they waited for her return. Instead, she leaned against the car grimacing as she shielded her eyes from the sun. She wondered if she should say something to Dante while they waited for Kat, but she didn’t want to say anything that would make their comfortable silence _uncomfortable._

In the end, they didn’t have to wait too long for Kat to return to the car, waving over her shoulder at the supplier as she set a small back on top of the boxes in the trunk.

“Finally,” Lexi drawled.

“You didn’t have to wait outside, you could have stayed in the shop,” Kat pointed out as the trunk began to close automatically. “You sure you don’t want to help me with the spell?”

“Yeah, I’m good.”

Dante chuckled, “That bad, huh?”

“You thought the spray smelled bad; shit smells worse while its cooking.”

Kat rolled her eyes and crossed her arms defensively over her chest, “Come on, it’s not- “

“Yeah,” Lexi interrupted. “It is.”

Kat climbed into the driver’s seat. Lexi moved to open the passenger door, but a hand gripped her wrist before she could open it, “Come on, let’s go. Later, Kat!”

“Dante, wha-?” Kat laughed as Dante pulled her friend down the road

“If it's as bad as you say it is, I’m _not_ going back until its done.”

Lexi couldn’t argue with that. She let Dante lead her around the corner, “But, where are we going?”

He released her as they fell into step and shoved his hands into his pockets, pointedly looking anywhere but Lexi as he wondered if he should have dragged her away so impulsively, “When’s the last time you went to the beach?”

“Beach?”

“Yeah, you know: water, sand, that shit.”

Lexi wracked her brain, but she couldn’t remember ever having been to a beach in Limbo City – the pier, yes, but never a beach. Had there always been a beach? There was a pier, so it made sense that there would be a beach or two, but why hadn’t she ever heard of it until now? “I didn’t there was a beach here.”

Dante grinned, his earlier doubts fading as they walked until the only things standing between them and the blue water of the ocean were the road and a fence. A car honked as he stepped into the road, Lexi waving an apology as she followed after him, and they jumped the fence, landing on the gritty stone of the coast’s cliffs. From there, a beaten path wound down the rocky cliffside, eventually opening into a small beach-like area – though calling it a beach had been generous.

Backed against the mainland’s cliffs sat a buckle of drying land revealed by the low tide. The small shore was smooth, rocks weathered by the repeated ins and outs of the tide with barely any sand in sight. The sun gleamed off the water as waves lapped rhythmically at the shore, trickling between rocks with each swell before receding once more.

“It’s not much, but…”

“This is amazing!” Lexi smiled, sitting down and shoving her phone into a boot once they had been removed with her socks. Rocks burned the soles of her feet as she picked her way down to the water and closed her eyes with a sigh as cool water lapped at her calves.

She could have kissed him for this – the cool water had been exactly what she needed to combat the heat.

Green eyes flew open as her legs were swept from under her. Dante smirked down at her in his arms as he waded into the water up to his hips with Lexi securely in his arms. She squealed as a wave tickled at her shorts and she grasped what he was about to do.

“Don’t you dare!”

“Don’t worry, I won’t let the sharks get you.”

“SHARKS?!”

Crisp water prickled her heated skin like a thousand tiny needles as Dante forced her to fall with him into the next swell, the sea swallowing her surprised scream. She resurfaced with Dante, his arms adjusting their grip around her as he threw his head back and laughed – a genuine, contagious whooping that made her stomach do flips. She splashed him in the face, causing him to relinquish his hold around her as he retaliated in kind.

They spent the day like that, swimming and dunking each other in the swells of the small waves without a care in the world as the sun tried unsuccessfully to dye their skin an angry red. The coming of the new tide eventually forced them to climb back up the cliffside and over the fence. Lexi stopped to grab popsicles at a nearby shop, handing one to Dante before they began the long trek back to The Order. When they turned down a familiar alley, their clothes were stiff with sea salt and Dante’s wet boots squelched with each step, but they were both smiling. Lexi couldn’t remember the last time she’d had so much fun, and neither could Dante.

Not even the putrid fumes emanating from The Order’s kitchen could ruin their mood.

“Holy fucking shit, it’s worse than I thought,” Dante covered his nose as Lexi keeled over in a fit of laughter even as the smell assaulted her. Kat, who was not amused by their reactions, had finished mixing her spell together and was in the process of funneling the chalky potion into empty aerosol cans, a pile of used pots stacked high in the kitchen sink behind her.

Lexi dashed past the kitchen and to her room where the smell was less noxious. Still giggling, she grabbed her shower caddy and a towel before turning around to hit the shower. Sure, she had taken one that morning, but after her swim she could feel the salt drying in a thin film against her skin making it itch. She stopped just outside of her door, smile dropping when she saw Dante had the same idea, his own towel slung over his shoulder.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I’ll just-.”

“No, Lex, you go first.”

“Are you sure? I really don’t mi-.”

“It’s all yours,” Dante conceded as he backed away from the bathroom door and into his room across the hall, unbothered, “I’ll grab the next one.”

Lexi nodded gratefully, smile returning to her lips. An idea struck her as she laid her hand on the doorknob, her heart jumping into her throat. He was so close but she missed him. She wanted to wrap her arms around him as she had in the ocean, to make him laugh and smile, to press her lips against his, to pull him in closer. Her head felt fuzzy, but she had never been so sure of anything in her life.

“The door’s unlocked.”


	11. The Door's Unlocked

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lexi and Dante... get acquainted.

Dante’s door clicked as it was shut. He had closed it as calmly as he could, wanting nothing more than to take Lexi up on her offer, jump into the shower and rock her world, ruin her for anyone else; but for the first time since his sexual awakening he wasn’t sure that he should. Forehead against his door, he drew tense breath, want and worry curling together in his stomach. Lexi was like a drug that he couldn’t get enough of and he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to stop himself once he had a taste.

She was too good for someone like him. Too pure. She would regret it.

He groaned, scrubbing a hand over his eyes as his thoughts turned back to the beach – Lexi’s eyes wide as he dragged her into the water, the smile that had split her face, her laugh. Fuck – was he a sap?

_No_ , he threw his towel down and flung himself onto his bed, _he wasn’t_.

* * *

Lexi had never felt the bitter sting of rejection as acutely as she had when Dante’s door clicked shut.

Dejected, she entered the bathroom alone, turned on the water, and stepped under the spray once it was steaming, focusing on the shower tiles as she lathered her hair. She had been too forward, and now she looked like an idiot.

And why had she even offered? Because Dante had kissed her once? Because they had spent the day together? Lexi stepped back under the spray to rinse her hair free of the shampoo before she worked conditioner into its ends. She had been a fool to think that Dante would want her – she was inexperienced, naïve, weak, plain – when he could have anyone he wanted.

Just because she craved his closeness didn’t mean that he felt the same, and that was okay. She would settle for his friendship, salvage what was left of it and make sure that things around The Order didn’t get weird.

The bathroom door opened.

Thoughts scattered; Lexi froze, fighting every instinct in her body that told her to turn around. The silence persisted.

“You’re sure you want this?”

Lexi nodded, unsure if Dante could see her through the fogged glass of the shower door, “Yes.”

_“Me?”_

“More than anything.”

Again, the silence hung thick in the air like the steam. Suffocating as Lexi tried to keep her breathing calm, even.

_Click._

The door locked.

Fabric fell to the floor, but still Lexi refused to turn around. Shortly after, she could feel Dante get into the shower behind her, a hand on her shoulder coaxing her to turn and look up. Dante’s eyes burned into her own, dark with need. The rough denim of his jeans pressed against her hips as he eliminated the space between them, cupping her cheek and pulling her into a needy kiss, hellbent on leaving them both breathless. He smiled into the kiss as Lexi opened her mouth for him, letting their tongues stroke against each other as she raised herself onto her toes, hands flying from her sides to circle his shoulders and fist in his hair.

Lexi felt Dante hum against her lips as he pressed her to the cold wall of the shower with his body and nudged a clothed leg between her thighs, a hand splaying across her lower back to bring their hips flush. If not for that hand, Lexi was sure that she would be a puddle on the floor, mixing with the droplets from the shower to swirl down the drain.

Dante furrowed his brow in concentration, his eyes still closed as they parted, “If it’s too much –if you change your mind, just tell me. I’ll stop.”

He tensed when Lexi’s hands left his shoulders to trail down his chest to tease along the waistband of his jeans before grabbing his belt and working at the leather. When he opened his eyes, she was looking up at him through her lashes, “I won’t.”

Button open and fly undone, Dante worked to kick the wet fabric from his legs while Lexi reached for the bottle of shower gel. She let her hands run down his chest and sides, delighting in every twitch she drew from him, and knowing that she would never tire of running her fingers over his figure.

Dante pulled her into another kiss, this one gentler than the first. His hands trailed from the small of her back, one working around to trace the curve of her breast and rolling the nipple beneath his thumb.

Lexi broke their kiss, throwing her head back against the wall with a moan, the noise going straight to Dante’s cock. She looked down then, her hands hesitating at his hips.

Dante’s lips left a trail to the corner of her jaw, tracking down her neck to taste the skin there and lapping at the droplets of water, “Take your time, you don’t have to - _ah!_ ” he was cut off by a throaty moan as Lexi grasped his cock in her fist, his hips jerking.

Lexi appreciated his concern – really, she did – but she didn’t want to be coddled like some virgin cliché. She had told him that she was a virgin so that it wasn’t a surprise, but as he continued to handle her like she was some dainty thing she began to regret saying anything at all. She wanted him, and she wasn’t going to let her hesitations get in the way when she had Dante right in front of her, naked and dripping wet.

“Fuck, Lex,” he husked, pressing their foreheads together and rolling his hips into her hand again as his need built, causing her to smile.

Heat pulsed between her legs as she watched Dante’s thick cock move between her fingers, “I think we’re clean enough, don’t you?”

Dante nodded, turning off the water as Lexi released him and stepped out of the shower. She was toweled off quickly, wrapping herself in her towel before Dante – who had forgotten his towel in his room – picked her up and walked brazenly across the hall. There was no reason to be shy now, but as she landed on Dante’s bed and her towel was gently tugged away her hands instinctively raised to cover herself.

Dante caught her hands and gently coaxed them down, the compliment on his lips left unsaid as he kissed down between the valley of her breasts. “Has anyone ever touched you before?”

Lexi shook her head, eyes half-lidded as she let out a coy, “Do I count?”

Lust flared inside of Dante at her answer and he sank to his knees, groaning and dragging her closer to the edge of his bed. No, touching herself did not count. He slung one of her legs over his shoulder, heat exploding along his nerves with the knowledge that he was the first to see her like this. He soothed her, fighting against the instincts that told him to _take_ as he rubbed circles into her thigh, his other hand trailing from her flat stomach to the apex of her legs.

Her hips bucked at the first press of his thumb against her clit, a hand flying to her mouth to muffle the loud, surprised keen.

Dante purred, watching Lexi’s face as his fingers skimmed up and down her slit before massaging her clit. The nub pulsed against his thumb, her skin burning for his touch – for it to ground her, to stop the world from spinning, and as her hips bucked, to touch her again. Words escaped her the first time he licked her, heel pressing into the bed as Dante’s hands captured her hips and held them in place. She writhed; one hand fisted in the bedsheets as the other flew to his hair, both pushing him away and pulling him closer, overwhelmed by the new sensations brought forth by the sinuous roll of his tongue.

He lapped between her folds, delving his tongue in and groaning at the taste of her. Her face was flushed, chest heaving, hips twitching as he held them down. She let out a spectacularly loud moan, back arching off the bed as he swirled his tongue around her clit and parted her lips to tease a finger at her entrance before slowly pushing it in to the knuckle.

“ _Fuck_ you’re tight,” he rasped, licking her juices from his lips and working his finger in and out of her slowly. When she relaxed around his finger, he added another, curling them in a come-hither motion. Lexi’s heartbeat kicked wildly against her ribs and she pushed herself further into the mattress, instinctively pushing her hips against Dante’s hand to chase the new feeling. Nipping at her thigh, Dante ground his fingers against the spongy flesh of her g-spot.

“Dante!” she cried, squeezing around his fingers and drawing them further into her heat as her orgasm bubbled close to the surface.

Releasing her hip, Dante instead wrapped his hand around Lexi’s leg, holding her open as she rocked her hips against him. “Let go, Lex,” he purred and buried his face in her clit, seeking friction against the side of the bed.

A breathy moan escaped her lips, her back bowing as the tension in her belly released all at once, pleasure flooding her veins like liquid gold. Her walls tightened around Dante’s fingers, distantly aware that he had added a third as he worked her through her orgasm. Dante crawled up her body, scattering what was left of her thoughts with a lazy kiss once she fell boneless against the sheets.

Dazedly, she opened her mouth to return Dante’s kiss, deepening it as he continued to work his three fingers in and out of her, playing in her wetness as he worked her open for the main event. She reached for his cock as she felt it brush her hip and he hissed at the light contact. He sat back, wrapping his free hand over the top of hers to show her what he liked.

Removing their hands from his cock, Dante moved Lexi to the middle of the bed. She was breathtaking like this; her body still flushed with pleasure, damp hair draped over his pillow, and lips kissed red. He had done that to her. God, he had never needed anyone so badly and for the first time in a long time, he was nervous. Yes, he knew his way around a bedroom, but he had never been with a virgin before – had actively avoided them. Would it be good for her? He needed her to want this again. To want him again. Once would never be enough. Fuck, he was a sap.

“Is this what you want?” he asked, taking a deep breath to steady himself.

Lexi nodded, her legs falling open, a move as desperate as she felt, “You know what I want.”

“I need you to say it,” he pleaded.

“Yes.”

He rubbed the blunt head of his cock across her clit before positioning it between her wet lips. Leaning down he gave her a surprisingly tender kiss, feeling her tense as he nudged at her entrance, “You’ve got to relax, Lex.”

Lexi knotted her fingers in the bedsheets as the nerves finally crept in, but her eyes were still lust-blown forest green. She nodded and forced herself to relax. And then he was brushing their lips together to swallow the surprised sound Lexi made as he began to press in.

It hurt. Dante did his best to keep her distracted, but no matter how gentle he was, nothing eased the first stretch of her body around his impressive cock. He flicked his tongue over hers, rolling them over each other as he slowly inched his way inside – small presses forward and back – until his hips rested flush against her.

Lexi clung to Dante’s shoulders as their lips broke apart, fingernails biting into his skin as she tried to adjust. Dante had stilled above her, his eyes squeezed shut and lips parted. She could tell that he was controlling himself, holding back from pulling out of her and thrusting back in with abandon. Instead, a hand left her hip to rub gently at her clit. She hissed, her hips leaping as pleasure and pain bloomed in equal parts.

“How you feelin’?”

“Full.” _Uncomfortably so._

Dante chuckled, looking beyond his fingers to where they were connected, “Sounds about right.”

As the pain lessened Lexi gave her hips and experimental roll, sighing when the move didn’t sting and rolling them again.

Dante took it as a sign to pull her closer, “Alright, ‘m gonna move.” He ground his hips against hers between slow, shallow rocks of his hips, his movements deliberate as he watched her face for signs that she was enjoying herself. When Lexi wrapped a leg around him to pull him in deeper, he drew his hips back and established an easy pace.

Lexi bit back a moan, the discomfort was still there but it was fading, pleasure trickling in to take its place and mingling with the overwhelming feeling of fullness. On the next thrust she moved to meet Dante’s hips with her own, a heady moan escaping him. She liked that sound.

Blood roared in her ears when Dante reangled his hips and hit something glorious deep within her. A raw, broken sound left her lips and she would have been embarrassed if she wasn’t blinded by want; instead, her toes curled as she wantonly ground her hips against Dante’s, desperately seeking more friction.

Dante smirked. _Bingo._

He withdrew until only the head of his shaft remained before thrusting back in with more force. Lexi’s body reacted instantly, desire coursing through her veins and settling where they were connected as she choked on another moan.

“Wanna hear you,” Dante growled, kissing across her jaw to worry at the skin of her neck until he knew it would bruise. Just the thought of her baring his mark sparked something primal in him and he snapped his hips faster.

“Dante!”

“Fuck, I love it when you say my name like that.”

She continued to chant his name like a prayer and he was drowning, lost in pleasure. Lexi was all consuming, like nothing he had ever known, he wouldn’t be able to let her go after this. He sucked another mark into her neck – she was something precious and she was _his_. Wrapping Lexi’s other leg around his hips he slowed his thrusts, reminding himself that it was her first time and he needed to take it easy.

“Dante! Please…”

“What, Lex? What do you need?”

Her breasts pressed firm against his hard chest as her back arched, unsure what she was asking for. Harder? Faster? “More,” she keened, pleading.

“Are you sure?”

She huffed, “I swear, if you don’t fuck me -.”

_Well, there goes easy._

“Hang on to me,” Dante grunted, crushing Lexi’s body to his and sitting back on his heels, the new position allowing him to sink deeper than before. He ground the head of his cock into Lexi’s sweet spot and she threw her head back and let out another wanton mewl, hips jerking.

He was certain the others could hear them now, but he didn’t care – a part of him reveled him it, wanted everyone to know that the angel was his. She wailed as he gave her exactly what she had asked for, grabbing at her small waist hard enough to leave finger-shaped bruises and lifting her up and down as he thrust to meet her.

Another orgasm began coiling low in Lexi’s belly as she was bounced on Dante’s lap, hands scrabbling for purchase on his back and leaving behind angry red lines as she let out a string of curses.

Shivers raced up Dante’s spine at the desperation in Lexi’s voice and the tight squeeze of her each time he hit that spot. He pulled her hips down harder, feeling his own orgasm beginning to build. He leaned back, taking her in – the way she bit her lip to try and muffle her cries, how full breasts bounced and her thighs strained, and how she took his fat cock again and again, and-

_Fuck!_ They hadn’t used protection.

Lexi whined as he lifted her off of him, laying her against the bed and kissing her thoroughly, “I’m not wearing a condom. How do you-?”

Propping herself up on her elbows, Lexi leaned in until their lips brushed, “Worried you’re going to put a baby in me, Dante?” She didn’t let the question hang in the air, nibbling his bottom lip and pulling him down into a needy kiss, “I’m on the pill.”

Dante moaned as he sank back into Lexi’s tight heat. _Fuckfuckfuck_ , he wasn’t going to last like this. He hadn’t realized how badly he wanted to cum inside of her until the possibility had almost been taken away. Did she know what had done to him? He made a strangled noise, grabbed her legs, and pulled them over his shoulders to bend her in half, holding desperately to the last thread of his control as he fucked her hard and fast. The thought of marking his angel both inside and out spurred him embarrassingly close to the edge. He clenched jaw; he’d be damned if she didn’t cum first.

Liquid heat pooled in her abdomen, threatening to spill over as Dante thumbed over her clit, pinching and rolling it as his hips began to falter. Her eyes fluttered closed.

“Ah-ah, Lex. Eyes on me,” Dante rasped. “I want those eyes on me when you cum.”

With a final thrust, Lexi locked eyes on Dante and cursed; screaming his name as unadulterated pleasure pulsed through her. She was flying and falling at the same time, the world pitching around her as she clung to Dante as if he could stop her from spinning out of control, even as he began to fall himself.

Lexi felt Dante tighten his grip on her, a low moan rumbling through his chest as his hips stuttered and hot cum spilled into her, her greedy pussy milking him for every drop as his orgasm washed over him. She melted into the mattress.

Sated, Dante sucked Lexi’s full bottom lip into his mouth and massaged their tongues together as they continued to come down from their highs. There was a wetness as he pulled out to lie next to Lexi, cum already dripping down her thigh as he pulled her into his chest and kissed down her neck, the bruises he left earlier already fading.

“So, that’s what I’ve been missing?”

Dante’s arm wound tight around her waist, “You regret it?” Now that he had her – now that she was his – he couldn’t live with the rejection if she did.

Instead, she shook her head, brushing her lips against Dante’s and silencing his fears, “I’m glad it was you.”

A smile broke across Dante’s face as he leaned in to brush their lips together with a contented hum, “Sore?”

“A little, but it’ll pass.”

“So that’s a no to round two?”

Lexi smacked him chest, giggling, “For now.” She was in for a long night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My first attempt at writing smut. Fingers crossed that it came out okay.


	12. Limbo Penitentiary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The gang prepares to take Raptor News off the air. Dante and Lexi jump into the upside-down.

Fresh out of Dante’s sleepy grasp, Lexi managed to catch an amused Vergil before he set out on a solo run. Even half-asleep, Dante had not wanted to let her go in the morning. His attempts to lure her back to bed, however, had failed.

Entering the kitchen after a shower, the first thing Lexi noticed was that her coffee was missing. Normally there was a mug-

“Looking for this?”

Dante leaned casually against the counter with her mug in his hand. Not only was he awake, apparently, he had her coffee as well. Lexi went to retrieve her mug, but he held it out of her reach. “What, no thank you?”

Stretching up onto her tip-toes, Lexi reached for the mug, “How ‘bout you kiss my-”

Dante pulled her into him with his free hand to steal her lips in an impassioned kiss. Forgetting about both the hostage coffee and their audience, Lexi melted into the kiss – caught in the newness of whatever their relationship was now.

Vergil reached around them to grab the coffee pot, poured himself a cup, and sat next to Kat. “They’re like teenagers. Are they always going to be like this?” Kat shrugged in response as Dante released Lexi and flipped his brother off.

Lexi moved to take her usual seat, lifting her mug to her kiss-stung lips before Dante pulled her chair into his, an arm circling her shoulders in a casual show of possessiveness.

“Good night?”

Lexi sputtered and choked, looking up at Kat mortified. Dante, the shameless bastard, barked a laugh. “You were pretty loud,” he conceded, leaning in to nip at her earlobe, “It was hot.”

“And on that note,” Vergil’s chair scraped against the concrete floor, “we need to get going. You two have a long day ahead of you.”

Grateful for the change in topic, Lexi pushed her own chair back from the table.

“…I hope you at least got _some_ sleep last night.”

Her head connected with the table in shame and she groaned. Vergil was in on it.

Kat laughed at her misfortune.

Dante was ready to climb into the backseat of the car after Lexi, when Vergil stopped him with a hand on his arm, allowing Kat into the backseat instead. Once everyone was settled, they took off, parking on one end of a bridge and walking against traffic to its apex.

“We’ve got Mundus’ attention. Now to land the second blow and disable his monitoring network. Raptor News Tower. Controlled by Mundus, they’ve a monopoly over the world’s media: news, advertising, entertainment.”

Dante leaned against the rail, “Mind control.”

“Yeah. And surveillance. They spy on the populace through their network of satellites, routers, and CCTV cameras.”

Lexi thought back to the news clip Norah sent her. _Terrorist._ “Yeah, I noticed that bit. So, what’s the plan?”

“Kat.”

“The Raptor News Network is run by a demon, Bob Barbas.”

Lexi laughed, “Seriously?”

“So he’s more than just a fucking dick… And he’s in that tower?”

“Not that tower,” Kat shook her head and pointed at its reflection in the water, “that one.”

“In Limbo, that’s not a reflection. That’s the real deal,” Vergil elaborated. “It’s a prison and Barbas rules it cruelly. There’s no mercy and no escape.” He prompted Kat to prepare the gateway and she dropped to a knee. “It’ll just be the two of you this time. Kat can’t follow where you’re headed.”

Dante was ready to go, focused on the news tower, “That’s fine. She’s done enough.”

“On the plus side, there won’t be any cameras down there.” Lexi breathed a sigh of relief. At least they wouldn’t have to worry about the cameras giving them away.

They approached the gateway together.

“We don’t know much about this demon. No distractions,” Kat warned.

Dante smirked, “Don’t worry, I’m all distractioned out.”

Lexi escaped the teasing with a step into the gateway. Air rushed out of lungs as she fell through the corporeal bridge and rushed to meet the water. Instead of slowing her descent, the water’s broken surface rippled and gravity reversed. She continued to fall, this time below the water-like façade until she landed on a sturdy pile of debris. Dante came to a similar stop behind her.

The prison watchtower loomed in the distance and they worked their way from platform to platform as Dante used his grappling gun to clear or create their path as needed. At a dead end, his fists doubled in size and gave off a red glow before he punched through a section of wall.

 _That’s new_. “Where did those come from?”

“Like ‘em?” he held his fists up grinning as Lexi walked past him. “You don’t have to play hard to get, I already got you,” his rough voice caused her heart to flutter as he grabbed at her hips, pulling her close as she brought out his grappling gun and swung them to the next cluster of platforms.

Death knights attacked them as they landed, but that had barely slowed them down. The tyrant that spawned afterwards was another story, but they eventually got the better of it too, the fight ending when Dante smashed the tyrant to pieces with Eryx. Unimpeded, they made their way to the gates of the Central Penitentiary. A shiver wracked through Lexi at the thought of what must be beyond its walls.

“Wow. So even Limbo has a slammer. Never thought I’d be breaking into jail.”

“You’ve been to jail?” He had glazed over that part the night they talked over pizza.

They continued around the penitentiary’s walls. Screens of various sizes were embedded into every surface.

 _“You have committed crimes against the holy order of demons. Mundus has allowed you to live so that you may serve him. Rejoice in this gift of life,”_ a red-eyed Barbas relayed to the tortured souls.

 _Holy order of demons? This gift of life?_ Surely death would be better than an eternity spent listening to Bob Barbas, but maybe that was the point.

After a brief detour they were back on track to reach the tower, though a small purple demon was always in their way despite Dante’s best efforts to get it to ‘scram.’ They followed the demon into a room, doors slamming shut behind them as all of the souls in the room screamed at once, writhing on the floor in agony. Lexi clapped her hands over her ears but could not block out the sound of their pain.

“You okay?”

Anguish almost doubled her over as it assaulted her senses, bubbling just beneath the surface of her skin and seeping into her bones, “This isn’t right.” But there was no time to dwell on those feelings as a small legion of demons spawned alongside them in the room. Lexi took on the stygian, too distracted by the emotional assault to fight the hell knight. When more knights appeared, Lexi pulled herself together and focused her efforts on the frost knight.

Pressing his back against a wall and lacing his fingers together, Dante boosted Lexi up and over the next wall, the squalor from the last room finally relinquishing its grasp on Lexi as they ran around a corner.

Once again, they found themselves stopped by the small demon.

“Go on, get lost!”

The back of Lexi’s neck prickled as the young demon wriggled its way out of the room, “It’s not alone.”

They turned as something approached. A cat-like demon prowled behind them. A rage.

“Looks like we pissed off mommy.”

After they cornered the rage and Lexi delivered the final blow there was a yowl on the other side of the room. A second rage hissed and spit, going feral at the death of the first. It crackled and sparked, glowing yellow as it spun towards them.

Lexi was quick to recover, hurling her sword at the rage before raining down on it with bullets. Dante struck the final blow with Osiris before they climbed over the half-wall and up the broken scaffolding around a construction elevator in their pursuit of what they now understood was a rage spawn.

Rages, it turned out, thrived in the penitentiary, which was unfortunate because they were particularly difficult to handle with how they always appeared in a mated pair – the destruction of one enflaming the other and making it more difficult to defeat.

Dante grappled them both over one last wall, landing softly on a bridge while a train ran beneath their feet. He set Lexi down and looked ahead toward the tower.

“We’re coming for you, Bob.”

**_DESTROY._ **

Metal trembled and roiled beneath their feet, a new train careening off the tracks as its cars separated and flew into the beams supporting the tracks around them and destroy the bridge. Dante grimaced, “Great.”

 _When one door closes…_ Lexi surveyed their surroundings. The way before them was gone, the path behind them a dead-end, only paths to the side remained. Movement to the right caught her attention, a prisoner – the first one she had gotten a real look at – stood fighting off harpies.

“Hey, look over there!” she took off in the demon’s direction with Dante on her heels.

A single harpy remained when they arrived, but Dante made quick work of it, pulling it toward himself before crushing it.

“Who’s there? I know you’re there! I can feel you. Who is it? I’ll cut your head off!” the demon continued to swing his staff around wildly to fend off any further attacks. Dante ducked out of its way when he got a bit too close and Lexi put her hands up in a placating manner, keeping her distance from the distressed demon.

“It’s okay,” she soothed, “we’re not going to hurt you.”

“Unless you give us reason to.” Lexi shot Dante a look. _Not helping!_

The demon brought his staff back to his side though his guard remained up, “Are you… prisoners of Mundus too?”

“No,” Dante clipped. “We’re from upstairs.”

“Can you tell us how to get to that tower?”

“The tower?” The demon considered, his interest piqued, “Why?”

Dante stepped up next to the demon, “’cause we’re going to kill the demon that runs this show.”

“Will you help us?”

“Kill it?” the demon murmured, staring blindly in the general direction of the tower. “Yes. I can help.” Lexi smiled. “If you help me first.”

Dante slumped his shoulders in resignation, “There’s always a catch.” Unfortunately, there was only one way to the tower, “Let’s hear it.”

Harpies had trapped the demon there for an eternity after they had stolen his eye. If they got his eye back, he assured the duo that he would bring them to the tower.

The demon drew the harpies out of the neighboring building while Lexi and Dante lay in wait. They didn’t have to wait long for the harpies to swarm.

“Follow them! Find their nest.”

Dante took the lead as they ran into the new building after the harpies. Limbo taunted them as they ran deeper and deeper before they eventually reached the nest.

“Remind me, why are we doing this for a crusty old demon?” Dante scowled.

“Because we need to get to the tower, and he’s our only shot.” The eye lay among the piles of trash cobbled together to form the harpies’ nest. “Think you could lower me down?” She was lighter than Dante and as such had a better shot of making it across the glass floor beneath the nest. She worried that the thin glass would give way beneath her feet at one wrong step, but it didn’t. She jumped to grab a firm hold of the nest and hauled herself over the gears and metal scrap until her hand closed around the eye. “Got it!”

**_KILL. TRAPPED. DIE._ **

“Dante, behind you!” Two harpies screeched as they flew over Dante, barely missing his head as more came out of hiding. An ambush.

Dante fought from his perch above the glass, using his grappling hook to drag harpies toward him and their demise. Lexi worked on shooting them down, lightly dancing out of their reach as they tried to steal back the mechanical eye. She yelped, gritting her teeth as a harpy’s spear grazed her leg and threw her blade at the same flying bitch to finish it off.

Dante grasped Lexi’s wrist to haul her off the glass once the harpies had been defeated. The eye blinked at them as they took a moment to examine it up close.

“Let’s get out of here.”

Lexi kept a firm hold of the eye as they retraced their steps through the subway terminal and fought another pair of rages. She wiped the glass eye free of dirt before handing it over to its owner.

“I can see!” The demon cheered, elated, until his eyes fell on Dante. His movements became slow. Wary. “Dante…”

Dante regarded him with the same caution, “You know me?”

“No. I knew your father, Sparda. I can see him in you.”

“Sparda was a demon,” Dante cut him off, his distaste for his father clear in his voice. “I’m nothing like him.”

The demon held his hand up to calm Dante, “No. Of course. You are Nephilim. I can see that too, just like I can see that your companion here is an angel… but she’s missing her wings.” He chuckled, “I see your father’s affliction runs in the family.”

Goosebumps prickled at the skin between Lexi’s shoulder blades at the demon’s observation and she took a step back before she could stop herself. “How did you know that?”

She became infinitely more uncomfortable as the demon’s gaze settled on her, the mechanical eye refocusing on her like a camera lens. “Angels are very distinctive when one knows what they’re looking at. They used to number in the hundreds of thousands, all strong warriors, but not strong enough. My dear, Mundus has been at war with your kind for nine millennia.” He took a step toward her, fascinated. “Last I checked there was only a handful of your kind left. You’re a dying breed.”

Dante stepped between his angel and the demon. “What are you?”

The demon snapped his eyes back to the Nephilim as he offered his hand. “Phineas. Scholar, inventor, prophet…”

“Demon.”

Phineas took his hand back, an amused smile pulling at his thin lips as Dante refused to shake his hand, “And until you arrived, political prisoner of Mundus. I am grateful.”

“It wasn’t a favor. You told her you’d take us to that tower.”

“Of course, my friend, of course. This way.”

Phineas walked back to the broken bridge, prepared to step off of it when Dante stopped him, “Are you nuts?”

“I forget,” Phineas fixed his eyes on Dante, “You and I see things differently. Seeing things differently can open new paths.”

“What do you mean?” Lexi asked.

“Dante only sees evil in me. Because I am a demon. Try opening your mind, Dante. It’s all a matter of perspective.” Dante and Lexi stood in awe as Phineas reconfigured the broken pieces of the bridge with a twist of his mechanical eye and a wave of his hand.

They walked across the bridge together, Phineas leading them through another dilapidated building to a fractured statue. “Her name was Assiel. An ancient one. Nephilim, like you, Dante.”

“I didn’t know there were others.”

“The Nephilim were the third race. Sadly, they were hunted down and slain.”

“Why?”

“They wielded the power of both angels and demons. But unlike them, the Nephilim could easily cross worlds. They were formidable.”

“Which made them a threat. Like me.”

“And like you, they had great potential. What a waste. You want to reach your full potential? Perhaps Assiel holds the key.”

Dante rolled his shoulders, “Lex, stay here.” He turned to face Phineas; he still did not trust the demon despite his help. “If you touch her…”

Phineas held up his hands and laughed, unworried, but assured the Nephilim anyway. “Not a finger.”

With a last look at Lexi, Dante made his way to Assiel.

“I can smell him on you. Mundus will too.” Phineas’ admission came after Dante had left. Lexi trained her features into a careful indifference and tried to ignore him as Dante fought a witch on Assiel’s wing. “You should know that this will not end well for either of you.” It wasn’t a question.

They spent the rest of their wait in silence.

“That was wild.” Dante swung back onto the platform. Phineas tilted Dante’s head and the Nephilim stiffened, the demon too close for comfort. “What is it?”

Phineas smirked at the shock of white in Dante’s otherwise black hair and released him, “You found your inner devil, alright. But you have yet to discover your full potential.”

“Mainly, I just want to kill the demon king named Mundus.”

“Oh,” Phineas took a step back, “And if you do kill Mundus… who will take his place?”

Uncertainty washed over Lexi as she regarded Phineas. His question was a simple one, so simple that it hadn’t even crossed her mind before he had asked it, and from the look on Dante’s face, he hadn’t either. What would happen when Mundus was gone? Would something worse seize the opportunity to rise to power?

Phineas led them to one last bridge, ready to send them on their way and finally leave this cursed place for good.

Lexi cleared her throat, “Thank you Phineas.”

“It wasn’t quite a favor. I want to see Mundus destroyed… and now I believe that you may stand a chance.”

“What made you change your mind?”

Phineas circled Dante, “You were right. You are not just like your father. I see your mother in you too. You want to hit Mundus hard? This is how. Mundus has power almost beyond limit. But… he has one weakness.” And just like that, Phineas had both of them wrapped around his finger. “His mistress, Lilith.”

“His weakness is that he loves her?” Lexi was confused, that didn’t sound like Mundus.

Phineas let out a full belly laugh at her naïve question. “Mundus? Love? No, little angel. Yet she has recently become the most important thing in creation to him. This is what I have seen. Lilith, his mistress, carries his child. His heir.”

Lexi’s eyes went wide at the information, understanding flashing across Dante’s face.

“You want to hurt Mundus? Kill Lilith. Kill the child. Nothing will hurt him more.”


	13. Breaking the News

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dante and Lexi go on-air with Bob Barbas.

Uncomfortable silence settled over Lexi and Dante as they left Phineas behind and made their way across the bridge. Lexi tried to wrap her mind around the information that the demon had just bestowed upon them; a sideways glance revealed that Dante was doing the same, his brow furrowed, eyes downcast and dark.

Lexi cleared her throat, “You okay?”

“Peachy.”

Worry seized her at Dante’s change in demeanor. Something was wrong. “Hey, you’re not… what he said back there, you’re not seriously considering it, are you?” Her voice was soft, but in the silence it stretched and grew until it filled he space between them and whispered echoes across the void.

“…I don’t know.”

“What do you mean _you don’t know?_ ” she snapped and brought them to a halt on the bridge. How could Dante even consider Phineas’ suggestion? “It’s an innocent-.”

“ _Innocent?_ It’s Mundus’ child!”

“But it hasn’t _done anything_!”

“And who’s saying that it won’t, huh? What if ki-”

“But it doesn’t have to come to that! Look, I’m sure that Vergil has a plan fo-”

“Yeah? Well plans change!” Frustration, exasperation, and confusion rolled off of him in waves, but instead of dealing with them, he was reverting to an emotion he was more comfortable with: anger.

They fell silent, then. Lexi knew she should have backed off in that moment, they were both worked up, but she couldn’t drop it. “And you’re sure that you’re okay with -”

“ _I don’t know!_ ”

Pure white-blue energy shot from the tower as it came to life and destroyed the bridge before them and brought their spat to an end.

“Good. We finally have your attention,” Dante forced a grin as though they hadn’t been interrupted.

Lexi regarded him from her peripherals as he focused his attention on the tower. If he thought that this conversation was over, he had another thing coming, but she would table it for now. They still had to work together to take down Barbas and neither of them would be of much use to The Order if they were dead.

More blasts came from the tower as the duo rushed between the broken pieces of the bridge left suspended in the air. A blast caught the metal piece that they were running across sending them sliding onto another. Electricity hummed close to Lexi’s back as Dante wrapped his arm around her tight and propelled them through a screen and into the tower.

Red and blue swirled around them as they landed in an otherwise white corridor, the Raptor News theme droning low in the background. The world pixelated as they stepped through the holographic screen at the end of the hall. The room that materialized was dark, illuminated by a half-transparent floating screen along one wall and half a dozen orbs of soft light set in the floor. Harsh red light coalesced in the middle of the room and with a mechanical howl, the bloated face of the propaganda machine himself materialized in front of them. He cackled as his demonic eyes bored into them.

“This is Bob Barbas, just doin’ God’s work.”

“Hey Bob,” Dante smirked defiantly as he flipped the demon the bird, “Put a spin on this!”

Lexi crossed her arms at Dante’s display, it wasn’t funny and it wasn’t cute and she didn’t care. She was still upset, dammit.

A floating screen replaced Barbas’ head before them, revealing him sitting behind his nightly news desk. “My personal view on the terrorists is that they are disgusting, degrading, ghastly, sleazy, prurient, and generally nauseating… The worst of them is Dante,” Dante nodded along with him, proud to be the main focus of the demon’s ire. “The whole world would benefit greatly by his non-existence.”

“I’m taking you off the air!”

“You think so? I wouldn’t bet on it, you little shit!”

Purple energy shot after them, forcing Lexi and Dante to jump and dodge until Dante delivered a strong punch to one of the glowing lights on the ground, stunning the demon even as it continued to taunt them in a low grinding voice.

“You’re not big nor clever, Dante! You’re tiny and stupid!”

They ran in to slash at Barbas’ face while he was stunned.

“Anything you want to say about that, Lex?” Dante smirked, having fun.

Lexi grit her teeth, “Shut up!”

“Still upset?” Well, if she hadn’t been before…

Barbas blasted them with orange as he collected himself, then shot at them with the same blue laser that had destroyed the bridge. Lexi jumped high into the air and brought her blade above her head, slamming it into another orb in the ground and bringing the demon’s next attack to a halt. She circled the demon at a distance, choosing to throw her blade instead of rushing in to attack from close range like Dante was doing.

Again, Barbas rolled his head back, stunned. Dante fired at his eye with his trusty grappling hook, “Segue into this!”

Lexi blinked, the dark room had disappeared and instead the space around her was a grainy grey-tone, “Are we at the pier?”

She stood back-to-back with Dante as stygian rose all around them and Barbas’ voice boomed around them.

 _“Now what we have here is some truly shocking footage of the terrorists, known as Dante and Alexis, at the Bellview Pier recently.”_ They had no choice but to fight the stygian as more continued to spawn and attack. He prattled on, _“…worst of all he was also a well-known cruiser in the seedier districts of the city, rampantly spreading sexual diseases of the unholy kind.”_

Dante barked a laugh, “And ain’t that the best kind, Bob?”

They were spit out of the news reel, Barbas’ irises pulsing an electric blue against the red of his sclera as he roared. Lexi and Dante continued in this fashion, hammering the illuminated spots on the ground to stun the demon before rushing to attack while he was stunned.

They were dragged into another news reel, this time fighting through the Virility factory as a stream of people gave false testimony and claiming that they had killed innocent people.

_“I have a message for The Order: the whole world is looking for you. Every camera on every street corner, every police force in the country and worldwide. We will find you. We will destroy you. It’s only a matter of time. This is Bob Barbas, from the Raptor News Network. Just doing God’s work.”_

Lexi landed back in the room on her hands and knees, Dante skidding across the floor as music blared and a screen flickered to life.

_“I interrupt this broadcast to bring you breaking news. The terrorist organization responsible for the recent attacks has been located and is being stormed by SWAT…”_

“No!” How had they found The Order? Was it her? Had she left a trail?

Dante grit his teeth as the screen depicted a SWAT team in riot gear outside of The Order’s hideout, photos of Kat and Vergil appearing in the corner of the screen. _“Two of the terrorists identified in these images are known to be in the compound.”_

“Bastards.”

 _“Two more terrorists have been cornered in another part of the city in a separate police raid. Rest assured. Those responsible will be brought to justice at any moment, dead or alive.”_ Bob signed off, the screen disappearing. “Though I rather prefer, _dead_ myself,” he laughed.

“We have to finish this now!” Lexi threw herself at the demon without waiting for Dante, desperate to finish Barbas off so that they could leave as quickly as possible.

Barbas continued to fire his lasers, “Who are you fighting for anyway? The people? Newsflash! The people hate you! Everyone you’ve ever known. I’ve made sure of that!”

Lexi’s blade landed between Barbas’ eyes as Dante delivered a heavy blow with Eryx which caused light to explode out of the demon’s fracturing façade. The screen appeared before them one last time.

“Breaking news, Bob! You’re fired!”

He whipped out his pistols and fired two shots into Barbas’ chest, the anchor standing from his seat and falling to the floor as Dante and Lexi were released from Limbo and fazed onto an empty news set.

Running toward the exit, Lexi yanked the door open and shouted over her shoulder, “Come on! We have to get to Kat before it’s too late!”

“What about my brother?”

“Vergil can take care of himself. We need to get to Kat, now!”


	14. Disorder

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dante and Lexi make it back to The Order just in time.

Barbas’ breaking news had been preemptive; the SWAT team had only just arrived when Dante and Lexi landed on the rooftop across from The Order’s hideout.

“They’re not in yet,” Dante murmured.

Lexi’s relief was short-lived. Armored police filed out of their vans, some working to form a perimeter while a smaller group formed at the mouth of the alley leading to the hidden entrance. She and Dante had made it to The Order before the SWAT team could make their way inside, but whether or not they had arrived in time to make a difference was yet to be seen.

“We’re coming, Kat,” Lexi murmured, sliding down the shingled roof and jumping into the alleyway in clear-view of a camera. As expected, the camera picked up on her movement – Dante hot on her heels – and pulled them into Limbo before they could attract the attention of the SWAT team.

**_KILL THEM._ **

Dante wasted no time and broke out Aquilla, swinging the shuriken-like blades at the demons before him as Lexi ran toward the back of the group; gun in her left hand, blade in her right.

Two rotary-blades cut through the roadblock as the last stygian was cut down and a butcher lumbered into the alleyway. The duo ran at the butcher, Dante jumping over while Lexi slid between its legs.

Lexi turned to fight when a hand on her shoulder stopped her.

“Go find Kat, I’ll handle this fuck nut.”

She turned without a second thought, sheathing her blade as she ran to find a way into The Order from Limbo.

Finding a way into The Order from Limbo proved to be a challenge. Under normal circumstances, the impenetrability of the building from Limbo was a definite plus, but now it was a nightmare. Then, for once, Limbo’s continuous shifting worked in Lexi’s favor. A brick wall partially collapsed inwards on the second story of a building next to headquarters. Lexi climbed from a crate onto a small balcony and then onto a roof. She steeled herself before jumping across the way and through the hole in the wall, then sliced her way through a weak interior wall.

The screech of The Order’s emergency alarm rang clear in the new room, vibrating the old wood floor. Lexi paced the room until she found a particularly giving floorboard. She bounced on the spot, then, blade in hand, she crashed into the old wood. Landing on her feet, Lexi ran through an open door before jumping through a hole in the floor and then into a familiar hallway.

She was in.

Around her, employees gathered in nervous clusters, their attention split between the alarm, the pounding of the SWAT team just beyond the front entrance, and their precious equipment. She wanted to yell at them to run, to forget the equipment and get out while they still could, but it wouldn’t do any good. They wouldn’t hear her from Limbo, but Kat would.

“Kat!”

No response.

_Where could she be?_

The sense of impending doom stretched the hallways as Lexi jogged between rooms and made her way toward Vergil’s office, eyes peeled for any sign of her friend.

Busting through another wall an onto a perch, Lexi looked down on a protective barrier guarding the next door, and though a butcher worked to cut through the spell it held strong. This time Lexi let the relief wash over her, knowing that if the butcher hadn’t cut through the spell that Kat must be safe somewhere on the other side of the door.

“Good work, Kat.”

She dropped from her perch to face the butcher, pulling out both her blade and her gun, “Hey, asshole!”

Stygian spawned between Lexi and the butcher as its rotary blades ceased working on the spell.

**_KILL THE WHORE._ **

Scoffing, Lexi shot at the first stygian, hurling her blade at another as she advanced on the lesser demons. The butcher trudged around, bringing its attention to Lexi and catching her off guard as it threw six blades across the floor, one clipping her in the leg and slamming her to the ground. Lexi rolled over and found her footing, finishing off a stygian with her gun as she recalled her blade and slashed at another demon that got too close.

_One down._

She pivoted around the stygian she had just slashed at, dragging her blade up its back as she jumped and coming down on it hard, slicing it in half.

 _Two_.

Ducking under the butcher’s next attack, she shot the third stygian before throwing her blade and cutting its head clean off. The last stygian went down with a shot between its eyes.

_Three and four._

Only the butcher remained. She holstered her gun – bullets wouldn’t do her any good – and gripped her pommel with both hands for a stronger attack. She rolled to the side to dodge an attack and as she stood the world appeared to slow around her, like everything was moving through molasses, but she was sharper, more in control. She charged the butcher, ducking under the slow arc of its bladed arm and launching it into the air. She jumped to meet it and slashed a combination into its back before slamming it back to the ground. The butcher rocked from side to side, trying to regain its footing, but Lexi kicked it back down, her green eyes burning hot with ire as she plunged her sword into the drum of its belly. Glass shattered as the demon raged hot then exploded.

Lexi’s breath was ragged as time resumed its natural pace, but she didn’t have time to relax. The fight wasn’t over. A witch spawned alongside a tyrant, the latter stomping its foot to charge as the witch conjured a flaming dagger and shot it in her direction with a wail.

The tyrant was clumsy, a point which proved itself when the demon ran itself headfirst into a wall, but the witch would be a problem. Lexi turned her attention to the witch, drawing her gun, but re-holstering it when the bullets bounced off of the blue shield. Instead, she threw her blade through the shield, shattering it as the witch screamed and summoned black spikes out of the concrete floor. Lexi rolled out of the way of the spikes and rushed at the witch, managing to get a few hits in while her shield was down.

The witch curled in on itself before releasing a telekinetic blast that picked Lexi up and knocked her back. She landed on her back as the tyrant roared and stomped its foot.

“Lex!”

Dante crashed down on the tyrant, halting its attack and knocking it into the air.

Lexi rolled, dodging the witch’s next attack and stunning it with a flick of her sword. “Look who decided to show up!”

“Hey! I came as fast as I could!” Dante grunted, his fists glowing as he pummeled the now-grounded tyrant.

Lexi ran to the stunned witch, ripping her blade out of its thigh and finishing it by driving the sword through its heart.

She reached the doors at the same time as the SWAT team and ran through as they blew the doors open from the real world.

“Remember,” the SWAT leader said through his mask, “dead or alive. Which means _‘dead’_.”

“Cowards!” Dante shouted as he ran past the SWAT crew and caught up to Lexi. It was a race to get to Kat first, and they were neck-and-neck with the feds.

The SWAT team failed to blow open a warded door and Lexi felt a surge or pride in her friend. _Hell yeah, Kat!_ Dante bypassed the door by lifting them through a hole in the wall right above it.

Two groups of demonic shards rose to meet them on the other side of the wall, Dante shooting them down as Lexi rushed the stygian. A ravager appeared behind Lexi, its saw coming down toward her back when Dante released a howl. Everything slowed to a halt while around her, Dante moved in double-time, his hair white, eyes and jacket a vibrant red. A shiver ran up the length of her spine at the sight.

She was released from time’s invisible hold as the ravager burst into a million pieces, Dante’s look fading back to normal.

“What was that?”

“My inner devil.”

Lexi hummed, Phineas’ words from earlier coming back to her.

Both worlds shook as another blast rang out behind them, the door finally giving way.

“Kat! Are you here? Where are you?”

Another group of employees were gathered in this room, grabbing at their work and their equipment in a frenzy.

“Run, get out of here!” Dante called out, but no one spared him a glance, “Dammit, can anybody hear me?”

“No. We’re in Limbo.”

Dante cursed, but continued on through the halls.

Eventually, they reached a dead end; the door before them locked tight.

“No, no, no, no!” Lexi muttered, rattling the door. This was it, the only door forward and if they couldn’t get through it before the SWAT team –

A garbled growl resonated in the empty space of the room. Her hair stood on end. “What as that?”

A humanoid figure rose through the ground – its chest bare, a tattered tasset around its waist, and a red demonic mask with a menacing grin over its face.

Dante snarled, “What are you smiling at?”

The demon tilted its head to the side at an unnatural angle. The glint from its twin blades was their only warning as the demon rushed forward, deflecting each shot from Ebony and Ivory, and then, right when it was about to crash into them, it disappeared.

Vergil had warned Lexi about these demons before. _Drekavac._

She whipped around, “Where did it go?”

Dante sensed movement over his shoulder before the drekavac leapt at them from a new portal and he grabbed Lexi, spinning them both out of the way of the attack.

“Oh, it’s _on_ , bitch!” Lexi gibed.

The drekavac moved with unnatural speed, dodging around their attacks and disappearing any time they managed to land a blow. Thinking quick, Lexi came up with a plan. “Dante, you take that side, I’ll take this one. It can’t sneak up on us if our backs are to the wall.”

Backs to the bookshelves, the drekavac had no choice but to attack from the front, losing the element of surprise and giving Dante and Lexi the upper hand. Dante parried an attack aimed at his head as Lexi rushed across the room to land a blow across the demon’s back before pressing her back to the bookshelf and moving away from Dante. The following attack was expected, and when the drekavac reappeared in front of her, Dante pulled it toward himself, slashing at it with his scythe.

They continued like this, the drekavac occasionally getting the better of them and slicing a thin cut along an arm, or back, or leg, but eventually, the demon withdrew completely, disappearing through a portal with no intention of returning. Lexi’s blade embedded itself in the wall where the drekavac had retreated. She left it there – it would come when called – as she charged through the now-open door at the other end of the library.

“Kat!”

The medium was huddled in the corner of the room, head down and arms wrapped around her legs. Lexi ran to her friend, she wanted to hug her to make sure she was okay, but they were on different planes.

“Lexi,” Kat kept her voice low, aware that the SWAT team was in the building and closing in on her.

“We’re here Kat, everything is going to be okay.”

“I don’t know what to do,” there was genuine terror in Kat’s eyes.

Dante took the lead, “Where’s Vergil?”

Kat stuttered, panicking, “I don’t know. He’s probably in the server room, the Octagon. But he might be trapped in Limbo.”

Trapped in Limbo? Vergil normally did everything in his power to avoid being pulled into Limbo and discovered. Had he been forced into Limbo in order to escape the feds?

Dante continued, “How do we get to him?”

“I don’t know. I’m stuck in here!”

Lexi moved to calm her friend, they needed to think clearly. “It’s okay, Kat, we’ll get you out of here. Is there anything that we can do from Limbo to break you out?”

Kat stood there, the wheels in her head turned but she was too overwhelmed to come up with anything.

“Think!” Dante didn’t mean to rush her, but they had to move fast. They were running out of time.

Kat locked eyes with Dante, his outburst knocking something into place. “There may be a way. I’ll guide you.”

She ran to a concrete wall and, bringing out her spray can, drew half of a red circle as the SWAT team worked on the door at the other end of the room. Kat abandoned the half circle and took off towards the door.

It was Lexi’s turn to panic, “Kat, are you crazy?!”

“Kat, we can’t stop them from here.”

Ignoring them, Kat sprayed a new circle onto the wall in the door way, “Yes you can. I spray, you bring the wall down. Now pull it!”

Dante latched onto the symbol with his grappling hook and pulled, the ceiling bowed under the lack of support, but otherwise stayed where it was. Another circle was sprayed into the other side of the doorway and Dante didn’t hesitate to latch on and pull. The ceiling came crashing down on the SWAT team as they managed to burst through the door.

“You okay?”

Kat picked herself up, shaken and dusty, but unhurt, “Yeah. Come on.”

Kat ran back across the room, finished the circle and stepping aside so that Dante could pull the wall down. The trio stepped into the revealed tunnel; the stunt on the other end of the room would only buy them so much time. Kat led them through rooms that Lexi hadn’t known existed and into the server room.

“Vergil’s trapped in Limbo. He’s in trouble,” Kat gasped. A butcher had him backed into a corner of the large room behind a protective barrier with the servers.

Unsheathing Rebellion, Dante stepped forward. “Hey you!”

That was when Vergil noticed them, “Dante! Are you crazy? What are you doing here?”

“I’m busting you out of here, bro.”

The butcher’s sawblade hands let out a metallic _whir_ as it faced them and shifted it weight from side to side. Lexi raised herself onto the balls of her feet, sword at the ready when the butcher threw its blades across the room at them. She parried, knocking a blade at the demon and stunning it as Dante rolled to the side and raced forward, punching the butcher hard enough to lift it off the ground. Dante dove to the side, barely avoiding a blow to the head and lashing out with Rebellion until the demon glowed red-hot. Lexi threw her blade at the butcher’s belly and Dante drove it home before retreating as the butcher seized and exploded.

“You okay?” Dante asked, rushing to his brother’s side.

“Yeah. Thank you, Dante.” He nodded at Lexi before noticing the medium was with them. “Kat! You’re still alive!”

Something about the surprise in his voice didn’t sit well with Lexi, but there was no time to dwell on it, the SWAT team was practically upon them now.

“Is there a way out of here,” Dante interrupted Vergil who was making his way to Kat.

“Yes. There’s an emergency gate. I’ll take you there.”

“Good. Let’s go.”

“No, not yet,” Vergil stopped him.

“What?”

Vergil turned back to face the servers, “There are _terabytes_ of sensitive data here. We cannot let them get their hands on it.”

“What does it matter?” Dante argued.

“They’d know everything about our plans. If they get their hands on that data, everything that I worked for will be for _nothing_. Kat.”

“Yes?” she breathed, always at Vergil’s beck and call.

“Arm self-destruct. I can’t do it from Limbo.” Kat rushed to the computer, fingers flying over the keys.

“The demons are breaking in,” Dante announced.

Lexi approached Vergil, “Vergil, please, we don’t have time for this.”

“Then _make time_ , Alexis!”

Suddenly, Dante was between her and his brother. “Don’t fucking talk to her like that,” he warned, his tone low and controlled; dangerous. The brothers stood like that – chest to chest – for what felt like an eternity, even after Lexi huffed and jogged to the center of the room.

Maintaining eye contact, Vergil addressed Kat, “Kat – do it now. This won’t take long. I’ll help you.”

“How long do you guys need?” Dante called over his shoulder while moving to join Lexi.

“Not long. A couple of minutes.”

**_KILL THEM ALL!_ **

Lexi unsheathed her sword, “They’re in!”

An endless wave of demons made their way into the server room, but Dante and Lexi had a handle on it. Dante triggered when a butcher spawned with a group of ravagers, losing control as a pack of rage spawn crawled down the walls to meet their demise.

A shotgun slid to a stop at Dante’s feet. He picked the gun up and examined it before tossing it to Lexi who immediately used it to take down a hoard of demonic shards. Though she preferred her own pistol, there was no denying that the shotgun packed a punch.

“How are you guys doing, Vergil?” she called, resting the shotgun up against her shoulder.

“Two more minutes.”

“Vergil, we can keep the demons off your back for as long as you need, but we can’t protect Kat from the Feds. Step on it!”

“Understood. Two minutes,” Vergil groused at his brother, refusing to take his eyes off of the computer screen from over Kat’s shoulder.

After another three waves, the demons began to slow down but the banging on the server room door was growing louder, “Vergil?”

“It’s all set to go. I just need a minute to grab what I can get from the servers.”

“You’re putting her in danger!” Dante yelled from across the room.

“It’s okay,” Kat spoke up evenly, calmer with Vergil by her side, “this is important.”

Lexi blanched, “More important than your life?!” She found that hard to believe, but Kat didn’t respond.

Two rages appeared, Dante yelling at his brother to come on as Lexi finished the last one off.

“It’s done. Dante, Lexi, let’s go.”

Lexi was at Kat’s side in an instant, “What about you? We need to get you out of here.”

The medium shook her head, “There’s no way out for me in the real world.”

“Dante, we can’t just leave her here!”

“Think, Dante! We’re in Limbo, she’s in the real world. This place is going to blow in any minute.”

That’s when it dawned on Lexi. There was no other way out of the compound – at least, not from the human dimension. Vergil had jumped ship to Limbo because it was his only escape route. Kat, the techs, everyone else had been doomed when the feds had surrounded the building and busted down the front door. She shook her head, unwilling to believe what was happening, “But there has to be another way!”

“There’s no way for my body to faze into Limbo.”

“See, there’s nothing we can do. Let’s go!” Vergil insisted.

Dante felt trapped between his loyalties to his brother and Kat, who had saved him a handful of times already. Time to return the favor.

“Lex, go with Vergil. I’ll be right behind you.”

Vergil turned to Dante, exasperated, “Dante!”

“Give me a second!” He snapped back at his brother before focusing back on Lexi, “I’ll do what I can.”

Defeated, Vergil threw his hands in the air and moved to guide Lexi when she stood rooted to the spot, but she yanked her wrist free of his loose grasp and followed him toward the gateway with a last look over her shoulder at Kat.

Lexi stood as far from Vergil as possible within the confines of the gateway, silently waiting for Dante so they could make their escape.

“So now you’re not speaking to me?”

Lexi crossed her arms and pointedly looked away. She had never been mad at Vergil before – frustrated, yes, but never mad – but now she was furious. He knew that Kat didn’t have a way out. He knew that all of his employees were as good as dead if they were caught. He knew and he didn’t care. He had only planned a way out for himself.

“She knew what she was signing up for when she joined The Order, we were all prepared to die for-.”

“No one is ever _prepared_ to die, Vergil.”

Dante appeared as the room began to shake violently, squeezing into the gateway as Vergil crouched down to activate the spell. They emerged from Limbo on a rooftop overlooking the carnage; smoke billowing from the open garage door. Dante squeezed Lexi’s shoulder lightly as Vergil walked off across the roof.

“Come on. This isn’t over yet.”


	15. The Safehouse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vergil brings Dante and Lexi to a safehouse so that they can regroup. Mundus has taken Kat hostage. Dante hatches a plan to get Kat back.

They left the burned-out shell of The Order, Vergil taking the lead and urging Dante and Lexi to a less conspicuous, more residential part of Limbo City with the promise of a safe place to lay low until they could figure out their next moves. He produced a key from his pocket and pushed the door open. The room was devoid of decoration and sparsely furnished, a thin coat of dust resting on every surface.

“Home sweet home, for now,” Vergil said with a tired flourish around the room as he stepped into the building. “It’s nothing special, and it might get cramped with the three of us, but try to make yourselves comfortable.”

The words were barely out of Vergil’s mouth before Lexi pushed her way past him and locked herself in the bathroom. She turned the water on hot and tore off her clothes, stepping beneath the water before it had time to heat up. The sudden change in temperature from cold to hot burned her delicate skin an angry red, but did nothing to wash away the memories of what had happened earlier or her shame. Dante had filled them in on how the feds had taken Kat away, how they had shot her while her hands were up then beat her unconscious as she lie on the floor.

Her fists clenched until her short nails bit into the meat of her palms, the superficial wounds healing in an instant.

She should have done something. She should have gotten Kat out of there. They should have torn down more walls until Kat could escape.

Vergil should have made sure there was a way out for her.

After all that Kat had done for him, for all of them, how had he been so willing to leave her behind. To leave her fate in the hands of those _animals_.

She turned the water off when her skin tingled and numbed to the burn, redressing in the only clothes that she had with her. When she poked her head outside of the bathroom, the safehouse was quiet. It appeared that only she and Dante remained, she didn’t know where Vergil had gone and didn’t care. Walking down the hallway, she found a bedroom and slammed the door behind her.

* * *

Dante was sprawled across the safehouse sofa mindlessly clicking through channels as he tried to distract himself, but his thoughts kept going back to Kat. They had led her into a trap and in the end all that he could do was make sure that the feds would go easy on her – _get down on your knees and put your hands up. Do not fight back_ – but he had failed at that too. He was knocked out of his train of thought when a door slammed down the hall. He sat up, running a hand over his face and tossing the remote to the other side of the sofa. Lex was mad at him and his brother now. Great. Best thing they could do now was give her the space she needed.

Dante stood from the sofa and made his way to the fridge. Vergil had left after Lexi locked herself in the bathroom and told Dante not to open the door for anyone, promising that he wouldn’t be gone long, but he still hadn’t returned and the fridge was empty. Hopefully Vergil would pick up some food while he was out.

* * *

Lexi buried her face in a thin pillow and ignored the knocks at her door, unsurprised when she heard the door open despite her silence and footsteps approached the bed.

“Scoot over.”

She turned to glare up at Dante’s silhouette, reluctantly rolling over to make room for him when he refused to leave. Dante climbed onto the bed with her, his back resting against the wall as she stared across the room and continued to ignore him. She was still upset at him for his earlier indecision, for considering killing Mundus’ spawn, but she found that those feelings were dwarfed by her anger at Vergil. He had made the decision that people were willing to die for his cause and he had left them to do so.

_Dead or alive, which means ‘dead’._

The techs were dead, the scientists too, and now it was only a matter of time until Vergil’s ever-faithful medium joined them.

“We’re going to get her back,” Dante said, his voice cutting through the fog of her mind. “When Vergil gets bac-.”

“Vergil doesn’t have a plan, Dante,” she bit back. _He was just going to leave her there._

“Then we’ll come up with one,” he assured her, wrapping his arm around her shoulders and tucking her head into his chest. “We aren’t going to leave her with those bastards.”

Lexi let herself relax against Dante, the exhaustion of the day catching up with her as his hand played through her hair and lulled her to sleep. Dante’s eyes fell closed soon after to the muffled sounds of whatever he’d left playing on the tv.

* * *

Dante woke sometime later, the room dark but for the artificial orange light that filtered through the window from the street. His arm was wrapped around Lexi, who was still asleep against his chest, and his back hurt from dozing off against the wall. He stayed there despite the discomfort and the voice in the back of his head warning him that he was most definitely being a sap and continued to hold her as she slept away her stress.

They were going to find a way to save Kat. They wouldn’t let her down this time.

It was quiet – late night or early morning, he couldn’t be sure which –, Vergil must have come back and turned off the tv while they were asleep. He carefully shifted Lexi off of him and laid her against a pillow before getting up to talk to his brother.

Vergil greeted Dante over his laptop screen, “How is she?”

“Sleeping.”

“I see. Coffee’s in the pot if you want it.”

Lexi chose that moment to emerge from the bedroom, her hair lightly mussed from sleep, “is that coffee?” Dante handed her his cup and went to pour himself another.

“Now that you’re both here,” Vergil acknowledged, turning his computer around on the small table and beckoning them over, “I think you need to see this.”

Lexi’s eyes widened as the video began: Kat was alive!

_“Say the name. Say the name!”_

_“Vergil…”_

_Footsteps echoed, slow and steady as Mundus himself walked on camera to stand behind Kat, the Hell Gate swirling ominously in the background. “Vergil. I don’t know who you are, or why you have been stupid enough to attack me. But I know you mean something to this girl, so I suspect this girl means something to you. I also know that you are collaborating with the Nephilim. I want the Nephilim. You want the girl. We trade their lives.”_

So, Mundus wanted to trade Kat for Dante. Lexi didn’t know what to do. They couldn’t trade Dante for Kat, but they couldn’t leave Kat with Mundus either. There had to be another way around this.

“Mundus knows less than I thought,” Vergil broke the pervading silence. “He knows my name, but that’s it; not that I am your brother, nor that I am Nephilim.”

Dante leaned over the laptop to inspect the video, worriedly fixed on the still image of Kat. “She must have been strong to hold out.

“Yes, she did very well,” Vergil agreed. “But we can’t save her.”

Lexi bristled, “What the fuck do you mean _we can’t save her_?”

“You can’t seriously think that I would trade his life for hers,” Vergil derided. “Apart from the fac that he’s _my brother_ , he’s the key to destroying Mun-.”

Lexi was set to explode when Dante cut in, “We don’t need to trade me for her. We’ll offer a new trade.”

Lexi’s brow furrowed. _A new trade?_ What could Mundus possibly be willing to trade Kat for other than him – the Nephilim? Her eyes widened, gaze finding Dante’s. He nodded. Phineas. “Lilith.” He wanted to trade Kat for Lilith.

“Lilith?” Vergil chuckled, “Why would Mundus care about one of his whores?”

“Because she carries his child,” Dante revealed.

The revelation caught Vergil off guard. He was clearly surprised that his brother knew something that he didn’t, that he’d found such important information first. “What? How can you know this?”

“When we were at the tower, we met a demon name Phineas. He told us.” Dante paced the room, picking up Ivory and fiddling with her to give his hands something to do.

“Yes. I’ve heard that name,” Vergil stood shocked, processing the new information. “This is amazing! We have access to Mundus’ unborn child? This is exactly what we need to get him out of his lair!”

“No!” Dante slammed Ivory back down on the table. “We use this to save Kat!”

Vergil turned back to his brother, “Dante, this is madness! You would risk the future of mankind for a girl?”

“Kat put herself through hell to protect us! We’ll find another way to get to Mundus!”

“Dante!”

Dante approached his brother, steadfast in his decision, “I am not abandoning her.”

Lexi held her breath. Dante wasn’t going to kill Mundus’ spawn. They were going to get Kat back. They just needed Vergil to agree, to agree that this was the best way.

“I can see that. Okay. We’ll do it your way, brother.”

Something in the stiff way that Vergil had conceded to Dante’s plan did not sit right with Lexi. Vergil was proud, not known to sacrifice his carefully thought plans for others, but he had given into Dante so quickly. She could practically see the cogs turning in his head.

* * *

Finding Lilith had taken next to nothing. Like Madonna, just typing her name into a search engine brought up plenty of information. Interviews, awards, rumors – she felt no need to hide from the limelight, her entire life’s work laid out for anyone on the internet to sort through.

She ran a club in downtown Limbo, _Devil’s Dalliance_ , and was known to make appearances every so often, and a quick look at her twitter revealed that she would be there the following night. Vergil had left them with that information, encouraging Dante and Lexi to work out the finer details of the extraction while he went to bed – more than likely coming up with his own plans.

By the time the stove blinked 4:17 AM, Lexi and Dante had come up with a plan that didn’t involve sending Lexi into the club alone. As much as Dante wanted to dressed her up – or down – in the club’s scanty uniform, it would be too risky to send her in alone. What if Lilith recognized the literal angel dancing and serving drinks in her club? No, it was best that they stick together lest they hand Mundus and his mistress another hostage.

Plan in place, Lexi was overcome with a new feeling. Having a plan had washed away her apprehension in a way that the scalding water hadn’t been able to, leaving in its stead a restlessness. She turned in her seat to face Dante as he leaned back against the sofa, his eyes closed and shoulders relaxed in the low light of the room’s only lamp.

Left over caffeine and adrenaline mixed in her gut, stoking a hunger that wiped away all thoughts of rest. She didn’t want to sleep. She wanted to ache. Was overcome with a want to feel Dante’s weight settle on top of her. To dig her fingers into his hair and watch his face as they got lost in each other.

She slunk across the sofa, crawling into Dante’s lap and ducking her head to feather kisses against the pulse in his neck as a surprised gasp tumbled from his lips, hands flying to grip her hips as she straddled him.

“Lex?”

She nipped at his strong jaw, boldly rolling her hips against his, “Need you.”

Dante sat up and grasped Lexi’s chin, tilting it up. He stared into her eyes, finding whatever he was looking for after a moment and capturing her lips with his own. She sighed into the kiss, eagerly deepening the touch and tangling her fingers in Dante’s short hair. This was what she’d needed, to feel his body straining against hers, to forget about what had happened earlier, and from the heated roll of his tongue against hers Dante needed her just as much as she needed him.

Bra unclipped, Lexi lifted her shirt over her head and shrugged the straps off her shoulders as Dante discarded his own shirt. Their teeth clicked together in their impatience to press skin against skin. Lexi dragged her nails down Dante’s abs, teasingly brushing her fingertips along the waistband of his jeans before she grabbed ahold of his belt.

Lexi broke the kiss to focus on the damn belt, her inexperienced fingers fumbling as she rushed. Dante pinched a nipple and she hissed, her eyes slipping closed and back bowing to press her chest into his touch, his other hand coming to help her slip the leather of his belt from the metal buckle.

“Mine,” Dante growled, his teeth sinking into Lexi’s neck.

Rutting against Dante at the harsh treatment only fanned the flames of desire with Lexi. She let out a startled moan and he worried the spot between his teeth, shoving a hand down the front of her pants and cupping her sex over her panties before pushing the soaked fabric aside. Lexi keened as he skimmed his fingers through her heat. She leaned back to return the favor, hand eagerly grasping his cock and stroking it as much as her position atop his lap and the denim allowed.

Lexi arched her back and shimmied her pants down her hips, her panties following soon after, Dante helping her pull the cotton down her long legs before shoving his own pants down his hips and kicking them off, pressing her into the worn leather of the sofa as he crawled up her body. His lips found her collarbone, littering it with licks and bites as he was overcome by a need to mark her. Her breath hitched as he slipped two fingers into her and curled them against her g-spot. Plush lips fell open in a heady moan.

The sound of a door opening barely registered over the blood buzzing in their ears. Dante caught his brother’s eyes as Vergil crossed the room to the front door muttering something about finding his car or something before the apartment door slammed shut on another one of Lexi’s moans as Dante ground his palm against her clit.

An amused smile split Dante’s face. _Finally, alone._

“So needy,” he purred, slipping another finger into her heat.

Need rippled through Lexi at his deep voice and she rocked her hips down, keening, “Please…!”

Their tongues tangled together in an open-mouthed kiss, “Fuck, I can’t wait.”

Dante hitched one of her legs onto his hip and held it there while he rubbed the blunt, leaking head of his cock against her, mixing their juices together. From the depths of her mind, a voice whispered that she’d skipped a pill, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. All that mattered was that they were there. They were safe. They were in control. Dante was ringing something out of her besides the helplessness that had threatened to swallow her whole.

“Fuck me, Dante.”

Dante’s fingers dug into the leather arm rest above Lexi’s head and inhaled sharply, their hips connecting in a single, smooth press. He wanted to pound into her, make her his over and over, mark her with his lips and teeth, show the world that she belonged to him alone.

_Mine._

He barely waited for her as he drew almost all the way out of her heat before pushing back in, Lexi’s eyes falling shut as her lips opened in another moan – he would never get tired of that noise. He lunged forward, biting her bottom lip and sucking it into his mouth, his hips setting a demanding pace.

“Gonna make you scream, Lex,” he panted. “Make you forget everything but my name.”

True to his word, he dug his fingers into the thigh wrapped around him and reangled his hips to hit her sweet-spot straight on.

“Dante!” Lexi arched beneath him, clutching to him as her nails bore red marks across his back, the sting spurring him on.

Her neck seared where Dante had branded her with his teeth. She was getting close. She trailed a hand down her body only to have it brushed aside, Dante’s own taking its place. Lexi’s head snapped back, Dante’s name falling from her lips like a prayer as he rubbed teasing circles into her clit.

He leaned in close, breath ghosting over her ear when he pinched the lobe between his teeth and tugged, “This is all mine now,” he growled as he snapped his hips to meet hers and slowed to a grind. “I’ll wreck you for anyone else.”

Lexi cried out, fire pooling low in her abdomen. So close. “All yours, Dante!” Was that what she wanted? What he needed to hear? “Only yours!”

“Fuck that’s hot.”

With a final pinch of her clit and a hard thrust, Lexi’s body pulled tight and bowed, her vision blurring as fire coursed through her veins to the tips of her toes. Her walls fluttered hot and wet and tight around Dante.

Dante grit his teeth and cursed as he was milked of his release, his fingers leaving bruises as he railed into Lexi’s oversensitive body before succumbing to his own pleasure, pulsing deep inside of her, his hips stuttering to a stop snug against the soft curve of her ass. He leaned to brush his lips over Lexi’s, their tongues twisting leisurely as they basked in their post-coital bliss. He sat back on his heels, eyes running down Lexi’s body from her flushed cheeks and kiss-stung lips to his marks blossoming red on her neck and further still.

Reaching out, he caught pearly beads of his cum on his fingers and pushed it back inside her puffy entrance, groaning hotly as the action only caused more to leak around his fingers and drip onto the sofa. “Fuck that’s pretty.” He felt his cock give a tired twitch, but as much as he wanted to go another round, he knew that they needed their rest.

Standing from the sofa, Dante gathered Lexi in his arms and carried her to bed. He curled his arms around her middle and pulled her back into his chest, planting a soft kiss against her head as they drifted to sleep.


	16. Devil Has Talent

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lexi and Dante kidnap Mundus’ mistress.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey fam, long time no see. Life got a little crazy for a bit there, but I'm back with another chapter.

When she woke, the apartment was quiet, though daylight filtered in through the room’s lone window. After a quick trip to the pharmacy, Lexi returned to the safehouse with a box of pastries in her hand. Offering one to Vergil, who had returned in her absence and sat stiffly at the table behind his laptop, she grabbed one for herself and settled into the sofa to wait for nightfall.

* * *

Vergil dropped them off a fair distance from the club before driving to a more secluded area to wait for their text; ready to swoop in as soon as they had Lilith and needed a getaway driver. Speaking of, Vergil handed Lexi a burner phone – his number the only one programmed within. Her phone-turned-paperweight had been lost in the raid on HQ.

It was a straight shot to Devil’s Dalliance. They followed the muted thumping of the club’s bass until they reached the building, scouring the outside for a back entrance or an open window, anything that they could sneak through without having to approach the bouncer. No luck.

Lexi crossed her arms, brow creasing in irritation. Surely, there had to be another way into the club. She turned, to ask Dante if he had found anything, but-

“Woah! You’re not coming in!”

_God dammit._

Lexi rounded the corner in time to witness Dante slugging the bouncer in front of a line of people.

“That wasn’t the plan,” she hissed as Dante caught the bouncer’s list. “ _We aren’t supposed to make a scene._ ”

“Oops.” Dante dropped the clipboard, now sporting a hastily scratched ‘fuck you’, to the bouncer’s chest and ushered Lexi through the club doors.

Inside, the club was packed, bodies writhing together from wall to wall beneath flashing lights and between curls of smoke. The crowd let out a cheer, going wild as the bass dropped, strippers twirled, and drinks spilled.

“Up there.”

Dante had pulled her in close so that she heard him over the booming and the crowd, pointing to a woman dancing above the masses in a second-floor balcony. Lexi smacked his hand down, not wanting to draw any more attention to them after Dante’s stunt outside with the bouncer, but that was definitely Lilith.

They walked further into the club, eyes sweeping the lower level for any sort of ‘employee only’ doors that would lead them to Lilith’s perch.

“Hey, Dante!”

_Oh god, what now?_

A woman flounced over, her angle outfit glowing beneath the club’s fluorescent lights. “Wanna dance?” She worried her bottom lip between her teeth and ran her hands down Dante’s arm, trying to tangle her fingers with his own. “Long time, sweetie! C’mon!”

Dante shook the woman, a dancer, off of his arm and brushed past her.

“He’s not interested.”

“Hey! Wait a minute, don’t _ignore_ me!” the dancer screeched, affronted by Dante’s lack of interest. She twirled in front of him, her tone flitting back to flirty. “Let’s dance!”

“Not interested!” Dante growled, sweeping the ‘angel’ out of his way.

Lexi would have found the look on the woman’s face as Dante swept her out of their way amusing if she hadn’t then yelled out her frustration for all the club to hear.

“Yeah well, FUCK YOU DANTE!”

A flat, guttural voice caused Lexi to turn, watching in horror as a bystander’s eyes turned black and wept blood. The woman was only the first, more voices hoarsely croaking, “ _Daannnteee_ ” in a ripple that reached Lilith atop her balcony.

Bright, blinding light assaulted them. Spots floating in Lexi’s field of vision even as she grabbed Dante’s arm and tugged him out of the spotlight. Too late. They had been found.

Beneath their feet, the dance floor flashed a sharp, citrusy yellow, the dancers disappearing into the shadows of the human world.

“Dante! Son of Sparda!” Lilith sang in mock welcome as two ravagers and a death knight appeared in the middle of the dance floor-turned-arena. “We don’t normally let the feral rats in here, but I’ve heard so much about you! I’m dying to see what all the fuss is about!”

Lexi rounded on the death knight, its body disappearing in a cloud of black smoke. “Ooh! Temper, temper little angel. Play nice!” Lilith crooned as more demons rose.

“Tell me Dante, what is it that brings you here?” Lilith taunted with a smug grin. “The music? The champagne sparklers? The girls? Or has this something to do with that scrawny little broken flower, I wonder.”

Dante bristled at Lilith’s cavalier mention of Kat. “I’m here for you Lilith, so get the fuck down here!”

“Well I would, Dante but… how can I put this… you’re beneath me.”

The room transformed as Lilith checked her manicured claws with disinterest, the dance floor dropping into a fighting ring as Lilith literally towered over them from her balcony as she addressed a crowd of unseen demonic spectators – she was having fun with this.

“From night club to fight club! We have a special event for you tonight. So drink up, shoot up, and place your bets!”

Two harpies flanking a tyrant.

Lexi dodged a harpy’s spear and flipped over the tyrant as it charged headfirst into a wall, stunning itself as Dante attacked the weak point along its spine. She jumped again, slashing at a harpy and slicing off its wing, running it through with her blade once it crashed to the ground. She shot down the second harpy as Dante finished off the tyrant.

Boos sounded throughout the club as the onlookers bore witness to the systematic destruction of Lilith’s fighters. It was Dante’s turn to be smug as he looked up at Lilith with disdain, “You have no idea who you’re dealing with, do you?”

A cruel smile stretched across Lilith’s face, her sharp teeth glinting in the light. “Oh, but I’m dying to find out. Let’s change things around a little bit…”

The ground rippled, the club’s sound system breaking apart and the chandeliers shattering, bits of crystal suspended in midair as the building’s walls disappeared into the ether.

“I’ve created this gauntlet run especially for you and your little friend, Dante.”

“We aren’t here to play your stupid games!” Lexi yelled, charging forward.

“Oh? Well. This is my club and you will play by my rules!”

Before them, a giant play button was embedded into the ground.

Lexi scowled. How come none of her plans ever worked out the way that they were supposed to? She was shaken from her funk when Dante placed a comforting hand on her shoulder.

“Hey, we’re going to get through this. You ready?”

Taking a deep breath, Lexi nodded.

Dante smashed the play button.

_“Welcome to the Devil Has Talent!”_

Her frustration came back with the addition of the gameshow-like voice booming across the gauntlet. Yeah, Lilith was having way too much fun with this.

“It’s quite simple,” the demoness explained, “survive and you get an audience with yours truly. Which basically means that I get to gouge your brains out myself. Fail, and both of you and that little bitch of yours die.”

Rounds one through three were essentially the same; Lexi and Dante were expected to make their way across the void and to a lit arena where they then had to defeat a small group of lesser demons while Lilith continued to taunt them.

Dante smashed the fourth play button and the electric yellow walls disappeared, shrouding them in darkness.

“Few contestants get this far. Congratulations! It seems the devil has talent after all!” Lilith belittled from somewhere above them.

Those next two rounds were fought in an eerie black light glow, first against a hoard of barely-visible rage spawn and then a drekavac. Dante and Lexi split at the first sign of the drekavac, but in the dark the demon had an edge that it hadn’t in Vergil’s well-lit library. With a final rumble, the drekavac retreated through a portal and their path was unblocked.

Emerging from a red staircase, the pair prepared themselves to face the sixth round.

“So, Dante, do you miss your little friend?” Lilith sneered. “It’s a shame you can’t be there to hear her whimper and cry! You want to know what she sounds like? A little like your mother did when Mundus ripped out her heart from her chest and ate it. Don’t feel left out little angel, you’ll have your turn soon enough.”

The promise doused Lexi in cold. Dread’s icy fingers wrapped themselves tight around her ribs and a sharp chill ran up her spine to settle between her shoulder blades, her heart pumping frantically as her breaths became shallow. She stopped to catch her breath, Dante turning on his heel to check that she was okay.

“What’s the matter? Didn’t you tell your little whore that’s how we kill angels? It’s a shame Mundus wants such a pretty thing dead,” Lilith simpered, “but I just love giving him what he wants!”

Lexi caught her breath and nodded at Dante to continue, finally jogging out of the gauntlet and back onto the club’s dance floor.

Dante growled demanding that Lilith join them on the dance floor and fight as the demoness doubled over and clutched at her stomach. Distracted, they didn’t notice the pair of rages that crawled toward them – a ghost rage and a blood rage –, their skin turning translucent with twin roars.

“Meow,” Lilith mocked as she recovered. “Talk about animal magnetism. Looks like you’re a bitch magnet, Dante!”

The rages hadn’t stood a chance even with their disappearing trick. Lexi sliced the ghost rage in half as Dante crushed the blood rage.

“Your turn Barbie,” Dante called out, once against pointing up at the balcony.

Lilith cheered at the opportunity to fight the Nephilim and prove to Mundus that she was good for more than just carrying his child. With a grunt, she threw herself over the balcony railing, landing in her heels and her stomach distorted under the club lights. She threw her wig to the side. “You know I’ve been looking for a chance to unwind.” The demoness’s eyes rolled into her head as she collapsed onto her hands and knees, as something much larger emerged from the back of her neck.

Face twisted in disgust, Dante watched as Mundus’ spawn unfurled, towering over the dance floor and its mother on four misshapen appendages, its three eyes bulging out of a face crisscrossed by dark veins under a slick skin. The spawn sucked Lilith up into its belly button until only her heeled feet dangled out.

Lexi gagged. “That’s why I don’t want kids.”

“I don’t think I’m ready for that conversation.”

Lexi stumbled back as the spawn wriggled its way across the dance floor and swiped at them with a clumsy paw. She set about cutting at the spawn’s feet to slow it down as Dante launched himself onto its back and slashed at the growth that glowed there. With a well-placed hit, Dante managed to send the spawn reeling, opening its large third eye.

“Keep that eye closed baby!” Lilith’s garbled voice shrieked from within the spawn’s belly. Too late.

Launching themselves at the revealed third eye, Dante and Lexi hacked and slashed until a shock of yellow energy sent them flying backwards. The spawn summoned a mirror ball and took aim at Lexi, who parried the projectile with a well-timed swing of her blade and sent the ball slamming back into the spawn’s face, causing its eye to fall open a second time.

They fought to keep the spawn’s eye open while Lilith tried to coach her offspring through the fight. The spawn let out an ear-piercing screech and fell to the ground stunned, Lilith slipping free of her hiding place.

Lexi elbowed Dante and pointed at Lilith’s exposed legs before running to attack. Dante latched onto one of the demoness’s legs and tugged, wrenching Lilith free as Lexi jumped to deliver a kick to her face.

Dante triggered with a howl, unleashing blow after blow on Lilith’s prone form until time resumed its normal pace and his hair faded back to black.

“No baby! Suck me in! Pull me back in!” Lilith pled as the spawn stirred on the ground.

Dante tossed his grappling hook to Lexi as he rushed to the spawn’s eye, fighting to keep it open. “You handle Lilith!”

Lexi ducked the spawn’s next attack and rolled beneath it, firing the grappling gun at Lilith’s exposed foot and dragging her out until she was exposed up to her knees.

“Get away from me!” Lilith screamed, legs flailing against each slash from Lexi’s sword before the spawn teleported to the furthest corner of the dance floor.

Grappling onto the spawn’s back, Lexi slammed her blade into a weak point below the demon’s shoulder and hung on as it quaked beneath her in an effort to shake the blade loose. Dante used the distraction to sucker punch the spawn in the face, its eye opening to receive a devastating blow that sent it toppling to the floor.

Grabbing Lilith’s ankle in her fist, Lexi pulled her free of the spawn’s belly.

Mundus’ spawn managed to stand once more, briefly, before it was stunned and defeated. As the beaten demon retreated back into its mother, the club began to pull itself back together.

Dante closed the distance between himself and Lilith, the tip of Rebellion held menacingly close to her face.

“Get up!” Dante demanded coldly. He spared a glance over his shoulder at Lexi before turning back to Lilith. “We’re not going to kill you or Mundus’ spawn. We’ll let you both live as long as you do exactly as we say.”

Lexi passed Lilith her wig and reached into her pocket for the burner phone while Dante told the demoness to pull herself together.

 **Lexi:** _We’ve got her_

**Vergil:** _On my way_


	17. The Gang Makes a Ransom Video

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lexi and the boys make a ransom tape, make an exchange, and take the fight to Mundus.

“You know, I can think of a few things we could do with this camera.”

Vergil reprimanded his brother before Lexi could say anything, clipping out that the camera was, in fact, rolling.

“Thanks for getting in touch, Mundus. Sorry it took me so long to get back. Regarding your trade offer, I’d like to suggest a counter proposal. The life of the girl…” He yanked Lilith up from her chair, the camera focusing in on her pregnant belly and the firearms pressed up against it, “for the life of your child.”

They let the treat hang in the air before Lexi stopped the recording and handed the camera over to Vergil. Dante promptly holstered his gun and sat Lilith back into her chair. They left the demoness unchained, confident that she would not go anywhere so long as they kept a close eye on her.

Mundus’ response came quick.

_The docks. 10:00 AM._

Hostage exchange arranged, all that was left was the worst part – the wait.

“I’ll take first watch,” Vergil insisted, sitting across the table from Lilith. “You collected her after all. Besides, I have some questions for Mundus’ mistress.”

The demoness turned from Vergil; disgust etched into the taught lines of her face. Clearly, she wasn’t about to answer any of Vergil’s questions.

Nodding, Lexi disappeared to the room she shared with Dante, crawled beneath the covers, and let sleep take her.

* * *

A knock woke Lexi from her light sleep. She slipped from Dante’s arms and greeted Vergil at the door, relieving him from his shift.

She took up a spot on the sofa, paying close attention to Lilith even as she picked up a book and flipped through the pages to give the demoness the illusion of privacy. From what she could tell, Lilith hadn’t moved an inch since she had been sat back down in her chair. The demoness couldn’t be comfortable like that, sitting stiff on a bare, wooden chair and clutching her belly. Lexi went back and forth with herself before she put her book down and walked into the kitchen, turning her back on Lilith before returning to the table with a glass of water for the pregnant hostage.

Lilith eyed the water before dismissing it with a turn of her nose.

Lexi scoffed, about to take the water for herself when she thought better of it. “It’s just water,” she assured Lilith, leaving the cup on the table and returning to her spot on the sofa and picked up her book. “You’re no good to us dead. Can’t get Kat back without you.”

Lilith gave no outward sign that she had been listening, which was fine by Lexi. Unlike Vergil, she had nothing to say to the demon.

It was sometime later that the glass scraped against the table. Lexi pretended not to notice.

The rest of Lexi’s shift was spent in silence, Lexi reading the book in her lap without actually taking any of it in. She returned to bed when Dante’s shift began, finally able to sleep knowing that they would get Kat back soon.

* * *

9:58 AM.

The sky overcast. Grey even for Limbo City. They drove past line after line of gently rocking boats before reaching the exchange point – an open concrete bay.

The SWAT van flashed its lights from across the way. Vergil responded in kind.

Go time.

Police stepped out of the van in riot gear, guns drawn and trained on them in the coupe. Vergil raised himself through the sunroof with a weapon of his own.

Lilith let out a stuttering breath as Dante opened the passenger door, rolling the seat forward so Lexi could help their hostage out of the back and onto her feet, while at the same time Kat was shoved face-first into the cement in front of the van.

Kat clutched her side, gasping for breath. Lexi tensed her jaw. They were giving Mundus what he wanted. Just a couple minutes and Kat would be back. She’d be safe.

Silver Sacks Tower loomed in the distance, the tallest building on the city skyline. Lexi regarded the building briefly, wondering which window Mundus was watching them from as the exchange got underway.

Dante grabbed Lilith’s arm and moved her to stand in front of Vergil’s coupe, then, training Ivory on her, he backed away. He raised Ebony in the general direction of the SWAT team, Lexi moving to copy him as Kat pushed herself off of the ground.

All was still, save for the boats creaking at the docks.

Lilith hesitated, looking over her shoulder.

“Move.”

At Dante’s command, the hostages began to inch forward. Lilith’s heels clacked against the uneven concrete with each careful step, Kat grunting with each painful lurch.

Lexi took a moment to visually assess what Kat had been through and whether or not she would be able to patch her up in the car or if she would have to wait until they got back to the safehouse.

The hostages made it half way across the lot when a shot rang out.

She turned from Dante, who was just as surprised as she was, to Vergil’s smoking gun.

“You bastard!”

“What the fuck-?”

A second shot rang out, silencing Lilith’s wail. Kat stood stunned in the middle of no-man’s-land, Lilith’s lifeless body falling limp beside her.

Dante charged forward, guns firing from all directions. Lexi and Vergil covered him, mowing down the SWAT team before further harm could come to Kat.

“What the hell did you do that for? This wasn’t part of the deal!” Lexi screamed, realizing that this must have been what Vergil had been planning the previous night. Was he worried that Mundus’ heir would rise to fill Mundus’ empty throne? Avenge his father? Or was it because Lilith knew too much?

“I had to.”

Dante helped Kat into the backseat of the coupe just as Mundus harnessed the power of the hell gate and emitted a shockwave from Silver Sacks Tower.

“Get them out of here. Go!” Dante yelled, slamming the coupe’s door shut after Lexi.

Vergil didn’t need to be told twice. The rear wheels squealed, kicking up smoke as Vergil swung the car around and floored it out of the docks, but they weren’t fast enough. The shockwave overtook the car in seconds, destroying the road beyond.

Lexi closed her eyes and concentrated on easing Kat’s pain with a touch while Vergil veered the car around a section of ruined asphalt and sent both women sliding across the backseat.

“Keep the car stead! I’m trying to asses Kat’s wounds!”

“I am trying to keep us alive long enough for that to matter!” Vergil bit back. Suddenly, the road before them bucked up into a ramp. “Shit! Hold on!”

The coupe launched into the air. Lexi wrapped her arms around Kat and braced for impact as their sailed towards a shipping container, but none came. Looking out the rear-window; Dante was chasing the car from Limbo.

_He must have cleared the path for us._

Vergil maintained control of the vehicle as they landed, steering them onto the freeway and flooring it as pavement continued to crumble apart in their wake, leaving other, less fortunate drivers to get caught in the pandemonium.

A thud on the room of the car signaled Dante’s return as they drove free of the blast radius.

* * *

Since they couldn’t take Kat to the hospital, Lexi had done her best to treat a passed-out Kat once they had gotten her out of the car and into the safehouse.

A shot and dislocated shoulder. Cracked ribs. Severe bruising over the stomach and face. Three missing toenails.

Her shoulder had been popped back into socket and wrapped in a sling, then Lexi addressed the bullet wound, wrapping it as well. She worked silently as the brothers talked in hushed tones on the other side of the room.

“You had no right to decide the fate of so many,” Dante grumbled, furious with Vergil’s rogue decision to shoot Lilith after they had promised her safe return.

“I know it was extreme, okay. I know there was a cost, but it worked. Mundus acted impulsively, in anger. The hell gate is spent, and Mundus with it. For the time being, at least. Now is the time to strike.”

“No,” Lexi piped up. “We need to give Kat time to rest, she’s in no state to do anything right now.”

“Yes, I am,” a hoarse whisper rose from the sofa. “You need me.”

“We need you healthy,” Lexi said, handing Kat an icepack and helping her to press it against her ribs. Kat flinched, hissing at the contact.

“While they tortured me, I left my body. That’s how I endured for so long.” Kat grimaced as she took a deep breath and sat up. “I explored Mundus’ tower. I know how it works. How it’s wired. What it feels. You need me to defeat Mundus.”

They acquiesced.

Kat asked for paper, but Vergil did one better and pulled over a chalk board and a pack of fresh chalk. Lexi helped Kat sit in front of the board, propping her up as Kat drew out the plans.

They spent the next hour learning the ins and outs of Silver Sacks Tower as Kat laid out their best plan of attack. Vergil would sneak through the backdoor to the security room undetected, but to do so, there would need to be a distraction.

* * *

“You sure you’re ready for this?”

Lexi smiled, handing Dante a sizable rock. “As I’ll ever be.”

“Hey guys!” Dante called, drawing the cameras’ attention. “You looking for a fight? Here I am!”

The asphalt rumbled.

In Limbo, the great tower before them let out a resounding _crack_ , glass windows shattering as its wings moved outward and the hell gate surged, drawing surrounding buildings in with its gravity.

Oh yeah, Mundus saw them alright.

Buildings collided midair, the street folding and fracturing as Dante and Lexi raced toward the tower’s entrance. They were forced to stop in the plaza, Limbo screaming for them to surrender as a team of elite stygian spawned. They let the guard bring the fight to them, taking the fight slow to give Vergil enough time to break into the tower through the back.

A witch appeared once they cut through half of the stygian, her interference buying Vergil all the extra time he needed to override the security system and shut down the building’s gates.

Once the crystalized barrier was down, they made a break for the front doors, pushing themselves through just before the barrier resolidified and sealed them inside.

A dreamrunner leapt to meet them, arms spread wide and wielding two short blades. Like the drekavac, the dreamrunner moved quickly, deflecting most attacks before disappearing through a portal only to reappear and launch a series of quick attacks. Lexi and Dante took turns dodging the dreamrunner as it wove in and out of its portals, attacking it while it lay stunned on the ground after each missed attack. The elite guard fought them to the death, not retreating as the drekavac had repeatedly done.

They shouldered their swords.

“Okay, Vergil should have knocked out the internal camera system by now. Mundus won’t be able to see us from now on.”

Once inside the elevator, Lexi punched the button for Floor 87 – kat had claimed that the floor would be deserted. It was where they were set to reunited with Vergil.

_Ding!_

The doors opened to reveal the silver-haired twin. “You good?”

“Yeah, we’re fine.” Dante nodded as he and Lexi took off toward the east wing while Vergil disappeared to the server room in the west wing.

In order to get to the east wing, they had to cross a sky bridge, but they wouldn’t be able to make it through on their own. Vergil would clear the way for them once he took over the servers.

Rounding a corner, they came face to face with a grid of lasers.

“It’s like something straight out of a movie.” Kat had said security would be tight, but Lexi hadn’t been expecting literal lasers.

The lasers flickered off – bless Vergil and his programming. They made their way across the sky bridge and into the east wing finance department. The shadows that moved around the room were barely human anymore, their voices and bodies corrupted beyond recognition just as Kat had said they would be.

To make it to the stop, they found an elevator.

“106.”

“What?”

“Kat said 106. You pressed 105.”

“No, I’m pretty sure she said 105.”

As it turned out, Floor 105 was heavily infested. Nothing like Kat had mentioned in her plans. Lexi tentatively stepped out of the elevator behind Dante.

“You’re sure we got off on the right floor?”

“…No.” Elite stygian spawned in the middle of the room. “But there’s no turning back now.”

Ravagers and a witch joined the stygian, demonic shards rounding out the group. Once the group was cleared, they moved up to Floor 106, slipping through a hallway as it came crashing down on them and defeating more lesser demons in their hunt for the next sky bridge.

More lasers. Dante paced impatiently as they waited once again for Vergil to deactivate the security system.

Dante smirked when the lasers blinked off. “Bingo.”

Alarms echoed through the sky bridge as the tampering mechanism tripped and the lasers flickered back on.

_Not bingo._

If the tampering mechanism had tripped, then that meant that Vergil was in danger. They couldn’t let him get dragged into Limbo, the entire operation revolved around Mundus not knowing that Vergil is Nephilim. In a split-second decision, Lexi turned to leave the sky bridge.

“Keep going! I’ll catch up to you later!”

“What? No! Where are you going?”

“Someone has to make sure Vergil doesn’t get dragged into Limbo!”

“Shit!” Dante felt a strong urge to go with her, but Lexi was already gone.

She ran through the hallway, passed the elevator and took the stairs as she retraced what she remembered of Kat’s plans to get to the west wing, hoping that she would get there in time to stop whatever had been sent Vergil’s way. She threw open the door to the server room and-

“Fuck!”


	18. This Is the End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The gang takes on Mundus.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Strap in, fam. This one is long.

After Lexi ran off, Dante turned back to the lasers. Partially disabled, the lasers blinked _on_ for two beats and _off_ for one. He landed on the other side of the lasers and made his way through the rest of the sky bridge and towards the main elevator where he was set to rendezvous with Vergil, and now, Lexi.

“Over here.”

Dante turned the corner and ran into the elevator, the doors closing behind him. “Where’s Lexi?”

Vergil furrowed his brow. “She was with you.”

“No, she went back for you when the alarm went off.”

Something was wrong. He could feel it in his bones.

Vergil studied his brother out of the corner of his eye. “You really care about her – about all of this. You once said you didn’t give a shit.” He gave Dante a comforting smile, hoping to take his mind off of Lexi and onto the task at hand. They couldn’t afford to be distracted with Mundus so close. “Lexi knows the plan. She’ll catch up to us, but we need to keep moving.”

Dante nodded. Lexi could take care of herself. She had probably run into a group of demons on her way to Vergil. His brother was right, she would catch up to them.

As the elevator took them up to Floor 154, Vergil handed him a powerful firearm – Kablooey – that had been lifted off of a security guard. Dante accepted the gun and slipped it into his waistband as they waited for the elevator doors to reopen.

The brothers split ways again, Vergil heading straight to Mundus’ chamber in the real world while Dante sought out another sky bridge in the west wing. He stopped for a minute to wait for Lexi, unable to keep himself from pacing before he begrudgingly stepped into the elevator.

What followed, as Kat had aptly named them, were the five stories of hell. The red elevator number flickered: _154\. 181. 369. 992. 154. 155_. The numbers flickered between _156_ and _157_ before settling on _666_ as a snazzy instrumental number rolled through the speakers.

“Kat was right. This is hell.”

Once the longest elevator ride in his life was over, the doors dinged open on Floor 159 and he stepped into an outdoor space overlooking the building’s main core. The sky glowed red overhead, clouds congregating and circling as debris was lofted into the air.

**_KILL DANTE._ **

Gripping Rebellion, Dante stared down the harpies between him and the core. He was almost there.

* * *

Lexi’s shoulders ached as she flexed her wrists again, still hoping that the ties which bound her would loosen even the slightest bit. It was no use. She lay defenseless over the length of Mundus’ desk, eyes wild and body tense with the need to escape, all of her senses tracking Mundus back and forth across the room.

He stopped near her, looking out one the floor-to-ceiling windows at the destruction the Hell Gate brewed just beyond his tower.

“This isn’t like the movies.” Lexi went stiff at the sudden sound of his voice – controlled, unbothered. “No villainous plots to tell you about. No escape. No happy ending for you and your friends.”

He turned to her, then, and Lexi pointedly looked away. “This is how it ends: I’m going to rip your heart out of your chest, _slowly_ ,” he purred as two fingers pressed over her heart, his manicured nails digging into her supple flesh the tiniest bit to make her pulse race with fear. “It will be _excruciating_. You will beg for your life, cry for the Nephilim to save you, but he won’t. Then I’ll make him watch as I eat it, and then I’ll kill him too.”

 _Fuck you_ , she wanted to bark, but her mouth couldn’t cooperate stretched as it was around a tie masquerading as a gag. She met the unsettling scrutiny of Mundus’ one dead, cloudy eye as a small sound echoed from across the room.

Mundus smirked as he withdrew his nails from her flesh and turned to face the Hell Gate. “I think he’s here, angel.”

Lexi tried to get a grip on her fear as the chamber door opened. Dante couldn’t afford to be distracted right now. Her heaving chest gave her away, her breaths shallow around the fabric as her green eyes met cool blue. His hands balled into fists, the soft leather creak of his gloves the only tell that her presence bothered him in the slightest, aloof in the face of Mundus.

“Why did you kill my child?” Mundus turned when Dante remained silent. “I will ask you again. Why did you kill my child?”

“Because you killed my mother.”

“Ah. So, it was revenge. I see.” Mundus took measured steps, hands in his pockets and rage in check behind a thin veneer of understanding. Every move calculated.

“It was more than that.”

“Oh?”

“It was for freedom.”

“Freedom?” The mood in the room shifted like the swirling energy of the Hell Gate. “Well, you seem to have all the freedom you need. The freedom to murder my heir.”

“I’m not talking about my freedom. I’m talking about mankind’s.”

Lexi rolled her eyes. _Mundus doesn’t give a fuck about mankind or it’s freedom. Try again, Dante._

“Mankind,” Mundus chuckled as he walked around the front of his desk, back to Dante as he again brought his attention to the captive angel. She was a prop meant to get a rise out of Dante – to throw him off of his game. “What would mankind do with the freedom, do you suppose? Because when I arrived, they had it. And what do you think they did with it? They fought. They killed. They starved.”

Dante’s eyes darkened as Mundus hovered a hand over Lexi, her body shifting away from his touch as much as the unforgiving surface of the desk and her binds allowed.

“I brought prosperity. I brought structure. What have you brought? Besides violence. War. Death!”

Lexi’s eyes met Dante’s briefly and she witnessed the shift in them as something clicked.

“You know what, Mundus? You were right, it wasn’t for mankind. It was – it was for revenge.”

His new tone caught Mundus’ attention more than any talk of the good of mankind ever would. Mundus didn’t care for the humans just as he hadn’t cared for Lilith, but he understood revenge. He hated that Dante had taken his heir from him, wanted his own revenge. _That_ was the knife to twist.

“I gotta tell ya – killing your child like that,” Dante snarled, advancing as fearlessly on the demon king as he did lesser stygian, blatantly disregarding Mundus’ perceived superiority. “Watching it explode into little wet chunks, hearing you scream like one of your little demon bitches. Priceless.”

Lexi’s scream was muffled by the tie when Mundus sent Dante flying out the door. He dragged her from the table and down the hallway by her ankle, then hurled Dante through a window and jumped after him.

“Let her go, Mundus! This is between you and me,” Dante demanded, pushing himself up onto a knee as Mundus landed and pulled Lexi flush against his chest.

Mundus ignored him, focusing instead on Lexi as she struggled in his unrelenting grip. “It’s sad, really. We didn’t do anything she couldn’t have escaped if she’d had her wings. Pathetic… At least your mother put up a fight.”

A hand slithered around to Lexi’s face, tugging the fabric free of her lips before drifting down her chest and over her heart. Mundus’ voice rumbled menacingly in her ear, “Go on, _beg._ ”

Lexi clenched her teeth shut as she struggled against Mundus’ grip. She tried to recoil from his touch, but there was nowhere for her to go. She shut her eyes and she fought back a scream as fingers began to dig into her flesh.

“I’m going to make you watch as I eat her beating heart.”

Dante emptied a clip into Mundus – nothing. Reached for Kablooey – still nothing. He unsheathed Rebellion, running forward with a cry only to be brushed off to the edge of the roof.

Blood trickled past Mundus’ fingers as Lexi gave in and screamed. “Stop! No! Dante!”

“That’s it,” Mundus crooned, his fingers worrying the open wound before slowly digging deeper. He snarled, murderous gaze fixed on Dante, “You thought you could defeat _me_? A _god_?”

Lexi shrieked in equal quarts agony and pure, unadulterated terror as she felt nails scrape her ribs, blood freely flowing down her front and soaking into her clothes. Distantly she heard Dante promising her it was going to be okay; he was going to save her. Her temperature swung hot, then cold; her vision swimming as her eyelids grew heavy – she was going to pass out.

Mundus cackled, “You’re powerless so save her, Son of Sparda. I-.”

Whatever Mundus had been about to say was interrupted as a shockwave rippled from his chamber, removing the barrier between the real world and Limbo as the Hell Gate shut and ripping away his immortality.

Delirious, Lexi threw herself to the side as the unrelenting pressure on her chest stalled.

Mundus roared as the Yamato pierced his heart.

“Leave my brother alone.”

Lexi watched from a pile of rubble as Dante stalked toward Mundus, grabbed him by the shoulders and threw him from the rooftop while Vergil dropped to a knee and cut the ties around her wrists and ankles. Sobs wracked her body as the dam finally broke and she clung to Vergil. She hadn’t been ready to die, but she had found herself knocking on Death’s door all the same.

Dante collected Lexi from his brother and held her close, even as he felt the blood from her closing wound soak through his shirt.

“Are you okay?” Vergil asked them.

“You took your time,” Dante shot back, but there was no malice there. Mundus was defeated. They were alive.

Lexi took a deep, steadying breath. “Thank you, Vergil.” He had saved her life again.

“You’re welcome.”

Explosions erupted along the street. Chunks of demolished buildings and ripped concrete amalgamating into a dark form that partially blocked out the red sun. The trio turned their attention to the creature – Mundus, this time in his true form.

“Two Nephilim? Two sons of Sparda?” The demon’s voice echoed as the trio prepared to face Mundus one last time.

“You ready for this?” Vergil asked his brother, unsheathing Yamato.

“We can kill him now?”

Vergil nodded. “The Hell Gate is shut.”

Mundus vowed that they would die, breaking his promise of no movie villain clichés as Vergil tried to source ideas.

Lexi pointed. “You see that eye of his?”

“Yes.”

“His demon child had one just like it. Vergil, you and I will work on keeping the eye open. Dante you-.”

“Get out of here, Lex. Vergil and I can handle this!”

“I’m not leaving!”

Dante held her stubborn gaze, but Lexi was unrelenting. He unholstered Kablooey and wrapped her fingers around the gun – he felt better knowing that she had it; besides, he still had his girls.

Unable to resist, Dante slotted their lips together, Lexi’s fingers finding their way through his beltloops to pull them closer together in a sloppy exchange that warmed them both.

They were interrupted by an exasperated Vergil, “You can fuck your girlfriend later, Dante!”

“She’s not my-!”

“ _I am Mundus!_ ”

“You’re an asshole!” Dante snarked by as Lexi created space between them and summoned her sword.

They split as Mundus brought his fist crashing down on the roof: Lexi and Vergil to the right, Dante to the left.

“Don’t attack him, Dante, just stay alive until we can expose his eye!” Vergil instructed as he summoned a sword made of pure energy and flung it at Mundus with a flick of his wrist.

Lexi followed suit, throwing her own sword at Mundus’ third eye before taking aim with Kablooey, the shot sparking orange before exploding. She kept moving, jumping between bits of debris to escape Mundus’ grasp while continuing to fire shots at his face.

Firing a few more rounds at the demon, Lexi landed on a half-destroyed building, Vergil appearing beside her soon after. His form was so different from his brother’s, feet light as he threw another barrage of energy swords at Mundus while the demon swiped at them, further toppling the building and sending both Lexi and Vergil flying to the ground.

Vergil rolled over and braced himself atop Lexi as Mundus poised to strike again, “Dante! Do something!”

Dante answered with a roar, his hair bleeding white. Lexi watched frozen as Vergil picked himself up effortlessly and continued to summon his projectiles, launching one straight at Mundus’ eye and opening it, even as Lexi was held down and Mundus slowed by Dante’s trigger.

“Now Dante, get to the eye!”

Mundus reeled back from Dante’s blow, scrabbling for purchase on nearby buildings. Then, finding his feet, Mundus picked Dante off of him like a bug and flung him into a building. Dante’s concentration broke upon impact and the oppressive weight of his trigger lifted off of Lexi as she watched him plummet towards the ground.

Rolling to her feet, Lexi ran toward the edge of the building. “Dante!”

She leapt, head spinning and vision narrowing to a single point, and then she was slamming into Dante from across the battlefield, sending them both crashing through a window. Glass rained down around them as Dante’s fall came to an abrupt stop.

Vergil appeared next to them in a puff of blue smoke. “You can teleport!”

“Apparently.” Lexi picked herself up off of Dante and brushed bits of glass out of her hair. She smiled cheekily as she helped Dante stand up. “And I _am so_ your girlfriend.”

“Look, he’s showing cracks.”

“Dante, do you see that?” Vergil called. Among the cracks in Mundus’ chest there was a glowing red cluster, and inside that the pure black silhouette of a man.

“Yeah, I see it. He’s still in there.”

Vergil led them through the building as it fell apart. “Mundus has merged with his physical body. That’s why he’s protecting it. So, if we kill his body, we kill Mundus.”

“So, we need to get one of you in there to kill him,” Lexi concluded.

Mundus’ face eclipsed the windows of the room they had entered, a giant fist wiping out the glass with ease as he caught Vergil in his vacuum. Dante slid after his brother, but there was nothing he could do as Mundus grabbed Vergil around the jaw and sucked him into the red. That as one way to decide which twin got to face off with Mundus.

“What have you done to him?” Dante demanded, shoulders heaving.

The giant laughed as it prepared another strike. Dizziness took over Lexi before she reappeared on a new building, Dante joining her soon after. The building shook when Mundus slammed his fists down in an attempt to crush them, barely missing on either side. Lexi attacked the fist nearest her, teleporting again when Mundus spewed molten lava at their perch.

The next fist, they attacked together, Dante holding it in place with his grappling hook while Lexi channeled her rage at the demon to power her attacks until Mundus broke Dante’s hold with a cry. They watched as the demon wailed, his right arm disintegrating up to the shoulder.

Before Mundus could douse them in lava, Dante ripped his eye open. The demon tossed his head back with a thunderous cry, Dante and Lexi stopping short when they caught sight of Vergil brawling with the smaller manifestation of Mundus.

“We’ll save him,” Lexi assured Dante.

They moved to the next building; Mundus hot on their heels.

While Lexi kept Mundus’ focus on her, Dante attacked with a renewed vigor, effortlessly switching between the weapons in his arsenal.

Dante brought down Arbiter with a grunt, Mundus’ hand releasing the building and disappearing much like the other had. The demon fell forward as they attacked its eye. Inside, they could see Vergil, nose bloodied as his body absorbed hit after hit.

Lexi took aim with Kablooey in one hand and threw her sword with the other, Dante unloading round after round into Mundus with Ebony and Ivory until Mundus dared get close enough to attack them with his face. Lexi’s blade embedded itself in Mundus’ open maw, Dante slamming it home with Eryx and causing the demonic form to stumble backwards, stunned. Dante reached for Rebellion, and taking his chance, launched himself at Mundus with a battle cry.

The demon crumbled and fell to the ground in great chunks. Finally defeated – for good this time.

The brothers found each other first, Lexi jogging to join them among the chaos that Limbo brought to the real world. Piles of rubble littered the streets, buildings creaked and moaned as they swayed in the wind, and fires blazed on every street corner. The air was thick with the smells of burning rubber, trash, and leaking gas.

Vergil smiled at Dante, leaning against the sheathed Yamato like a cane as he waited for his body to heal, beaming. “We did it.”

“ _I_ did it.”

The brothers broke into a laugh, genuine and carefree. Lexi reveled in it, delighting in how they could finally let their guards down and just be brothers not terrorists or Nephilim or the saviors of mankind. Lexi approached them with a smile of her own once they’d had their moment, hip-checking Dante and sharing a look with both brothers.

“What now?”

“Now,” Vergil grinned, “we get Kat.”

Lexi and Dante followed behind Vergil at a short distance.

“So, girlfriend, huh? Don’t think I’ve ever had one of those before.”

Lexi’s cheeks burned as she became self-conscious, mentally kicking herself for having said anything at all. Just because they had slept together didn’t mean-

“…but I’d like to give it a try. If, uh, if you want to.”

Lexi beamed. “I’d like that.”

They made their way back to the safehouse, Dante offering Lexi his hand as they climbed over a pile of cars and making no move to remove it.

* * *

Vergil cut the engine as they reached a cutout overlooking Limbo City in all of its ruin. Great pillars of smoke billowed from the city as rescue helicopters and news crews flew among the carnage. Lexi helped Kat out of the car, an arm stabilizing her around the waist as they slowly made their way to the lookout point, Dante keeping pace beside them.

“What is happening?” Kat gaped; eyes wide as she looked upon the destruction in its totality.

Vergil shot her a proud look. “Limbo has collapsed into the real world. What was once hidden is now laid bare for all to see. Revolution is in the air.”

Kat leaned heavily against the outlook’s railing, Vergil’s smooth voice washing over her as she took everything in. “I never believed I’d live to see this day.”

Dante drew circles into Lexi’s lower back with his thumb, smiling. “It’s the beginning of the end for the demons. Mankind will be free.”

“Yes,” Vergil agreed, smiling. “Free from the demons, the path is clear for us to rule.”

Lexi’s head whipped around, her lips falling open in shock. Surely, he hadn’t just…

“What did you say?”

Vergil looked back at his brother, brows furrowed in confusion. “The path is clear for us to rule.”

“To rule what?” Dante pressed, voice trained and even.

“This,” Vergil stated, looking across the city as if it was obvious. “Everything.”

_And if you do kill Mundus… who will take his place?_

No.

“Vergil?” Kat pled.

Realization passed over Dante’s face as he pushed himself off of the railing. “You mean – like Mundus?”

Vergil snorted. “No… No, we will be nothing like Mundus. We’ll respect our subjects, not enslave them.”

“Subjects?” Kat gasped.

“He means you,” Dante responded, walking past Kat to his brother. “He means humans.”

Lexi found her voice, incredulous. “I thought you were fighting for freedom.”

“It was his freedom we were fighting for, not Kat’s.”

“Don’t be simplistic,” Vergil implored them. “Humans are frail. They are like children. They need protection. Not just from others, but from themselves! We – you and I and Alexis – we have saved them.”

“The three of us saved them?”

“Yes, who else?”

“A human!”

Vergil spared Kat half a glance. “Kat was useful, but-.”

“Useful?” Kat gaped.

Dante paced before his brother and, unable to hold himself back any longer, laid into him. “Kat saved my life! Kat held out under torture to keep _your_ existence a secret! Kat led us through the tower to Mundus’ lair! We would have failed twenty times over if it weren’t for her!”

“And I am grateful for her sacrifice, but-.”

“But she’s human?!” Lexi interrupted him.

“What about Lex? You going to toss her away too?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Vergil sneered and gestured to the angel. “Under our rule we can draw whatever angels remain out of hiding. We’ll return them to their former glory. Don’t you want that, Alexis?”

She did, but not if it meant the subjugation of mankind, tossing everything that she thought they had been working towards into the trash.

Without giving Lexi a chance to answer, Vergil turned to his brother. “You could be the father of a whole new _race_!”

Reflexively, a hand flew to Lexi’s stomach. Is that why Vergil wanted to keep her around? As a liaison? A broodmare? If she had not taken to his brother, would he have come onto her himself?

“Angels and demons, together. You’d live in piece like mother and father. Like Paradise.”

Lexi had heard enough to make her world tilt – the metaphorical rug swept from beneath her feet. She wrapped an arm around Kat’s waist to stead them both and attempted to lead Kat from the brewing fight, but shock had glued Kat’s feet to the ground.

“Kat, we need to move. Now.”

“Listen!” Vergil rounded on his brother. “If you can’t see the chaos the humans will cause, if you don’t want the responsibility of protecting them, then stand aside. I’ll rule alone.”

“I didn’t help you destroy Mundus so you could take his place!” Dante shoved a finger into Vergil’s chest. “I can’t let you do this, Vergil.”

Vergil stood to his full height and rolled his shoulders back; seething. “And I can’t let you stop me, brother. Stand aside.”

“Don’t do this.”

“Vergil,” Kat breathed, “please.”

“Stay out of this!”

Lexi forced Kat to move towards the car as the brothers circled each other, then watched in a numb sort of silence as Vergil, the man who had saved them both, transformed to a stranger before their very eyes.

Vergil hadn’t expected Dante to hold his own during the fight, but the red devil gave as good as he got.

“It’s not too late,” Dante offered his brother an out, desperately trying to hang on to the only family that he had left; the long-lost brother that he’s just found.

Vergil stabbed Yamato into the ground, another form ripping itself from his being: a doppelgänger. “Yes, it is.”

Lexi had never seen Vergil fight like this before. He held nothing back, coordinating his attacks with his double with the sole focus of securing a win, on taking the throne that he believed he was owed.

Doppelgänger defeated, Vergil dropped to his knee and triggered – immune to Dante’s blows until, with a howl, Dante triggered as well.

Yamato clattered to the ground. Vergil gasped in pain and surprise; Rebellion run through his chest. He pawed at the flat of the blade as Dante forced him to the ground, driving the sword further into Vergil’s chest and the dirt.

Kat shook herself free of Lexi and approached the brothers, tears in her eyes. “Dante… Dante, don’t kill him. Please,” she begged, desperate for Dante to let his brother live. Even though Vergil had thrown Kat away the instant she’d fulfilled her purpose she still wanted to save him. Still loved him. Kat had been saved from one abusive relationship only to fall into another.

Rebellion was forced further into the ground, Dante deaf to Kat’s plea. Lexi dropped to her knees beside Dante, her hands trying to tear his own off of his sword as Vergil choked back another pained noise.

“I am begging you,” Kat’s voice wobbled as she fell to the ground, a tear making its way down her purple cheek. “Please stop. For me.”

Red eyes turned on Kat, and then Dante came back to himself. Lexi pushed up on his arm and withdrew Rebellion from Vergil’s chest. A snowy-haired Dante stood and offered Vergil hand. Vergil took the hand and allowed his brother to help him up, clutching at the gaping wound in his chest.

In the same moment, they released each other, Dante’s expression stern. He had taken no pleasure in winning this fight.

“The world is under my protection now.”

Vergil looked between Dante and Lexi. “You’ve chosen the wrong side. You are not human. Neither of you are, and you never will be.” He rebuffed Kat as she approached him, instead bending painfully to pick up Yamato where she had fallen and opening a portal.

“I loved you, brother…” and then her was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Might write an epilogue of sorts to tie everything in a nice little bow. Not sure yet.


End file.
